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Comment by PlunderBunny | Hacker News Reader

I don’t wish in any way to minimise or attempt to refute how you feel about the events your family missed, and I know a great many other people had similar experiences. Lockdowns, when done properly, do work. Here in New Zealand, we enjoyed more than a year of _normal_ life between our first Nation-wide lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, and the eventual emergence of omicron in the community. That period not only provided time for the population to be vaccinated (we got to 92% fully vaccinated) but also saved many many lives, and allowed people to do things like attend funerals and births which they wouldn’t have been able to do (safely) if there was no lockdown. History will record that it was the right approach.

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The US has 70 times the population of New Zealand, an underclass that's larger in percentage terms and less functional than New Zealand's, a porous border through which literally millions of people pass illegally-outside of the government's control, and tens of millions of illegal residents who have illegal or no ID and studiously avoid being tracked by the government. New Zealand is an island country with only a handful of international airports. There was no possible way that the US could ever have implemented New Zealand's policy successfully, even if Americans wanted to do so.

Sure - I think I agree that the same approach wouldn't have worked in the USA. But it's also not a binary choice between 'lockdown until elimination' and no lockdowns, but having said that, I don't know what the US or similarly large countries should have done.

You're using terms differently. What New Zealand did was border closures. The word lockdowns refers to forcing everyone to stay at home, closing all the businesses and schools.

Neither approach worked. The NZ approach merely delayed the inevitable and was horrific for citizens who wanted to return home and were unable to do so. One NZ citizen had to rely on the kindness of the Taliban because nowhere else would take her. Incidents like that are nothing to be proud of.

Meanwhile, good luck implementing such controls in places where it's easier to get to!

History will record that the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe, revealing the truth that expert advice was damaging and futile. Something that was already clear in 2020 to anyone who cared to look.

New Zealand did both, and both worked - it did delay the inevitable, but that allowed time for the population to become vaccinated, for supplies of PPE to build up, for hospitals to build ICUs etc, and provide time for the virus to change to the much-less deadly omicron (delta and alpha never spread widely in NZ - we avoided all of that). Per head of population, our death rate was lower than almost any other country in the world. And we enjoyed an entire year of normal life between the successful elimination of alpha/delta and the eventual emergence of omicron while the rest of the world suffered. All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice, and you'd be hard pressed to find a significant number of New Zealander's that think now that the better strategy would have been to 'let her rip'. Of course you can find personal examples where lockdowns/border closures were a worse outcome for some people (I have a friend whose brother was unable to see his dying father), but being able to quote examples like that doesn't refute the strategy, because we only have to look to other countries to see what the alternatives were - a much, much, higher death rate. You say "the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe", but you don't say what that country was - did it have a lower death rate than NZ did?

I was referring to Sweden, which did neither lockdowns nor border closures and ended up with one of the lowest death rates in Europe. Lockdowns didn't work, they just made things worse.

Anyway, death rates are garbage data during COVID. They were classifying murders by shooting as COVID deaths. They were classifying people who died at 95 as COVID deaths. Where lockdowns were implemented they wanted the measured death rates to be as high as possible to justify what was being done, so classification criteria were as loose as possible. In NZ the political narrative relied on border closures being effective so they needed deaths to be as low as possible. Public health is so corrupt and malign that you can never really know what's going on if you listen to them.

> All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice

Then they are idiots because COVID wasn't eliminated, was it? As you said yourself, their strategy was at best one of delaying the inevitable.

> Lockdowns, when done properly, do work.

It works when (or rather almost entirely because) you’re in a geographically isolated island.

Maybe the Netherlands could have pulled this of if they really wanted to, like them time they flooded half of the country to keep out the French but it’s not applicable to any other country in Europe

And Sweden did nothing and got an equally good outcome and doesn't even have the benefit of being an island country.

It doesn't take much time to find articles from reputable sources that show that Sweden most definitely did not have 'an equally good outcome' (if I understand you correctly and you're comparing to New Zealand). For example: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/comparing-covid-how-new-zealand-s...

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