More bad faith about New Zealand COVID policy from the Brownstone Institute
According to Our World in Data, as of February 25, 2022, cumulative COVID deaths per million in the United States were 14 times higher than in Australia and 259 times higher than in New Zealand. Most of this difference was undoubtedly due to the border controls and internal lockdowns these countries used to keep COVID cases at very low levels for the past two years.
A crude comparison based on cumulative death rates suggests that these policies saved many lives:
But were these restrictive COVID policies justified? Maybe, maybe not. No doubt the policies could have been better designed and implemented. Maybe restrictions should have been rolled back earlier, when Delta hit, although that’s not obviously right, since both countries were ramping up their vaccination campaigns. It’s even conceivable that New Zealand and Australia should have never tried to suppress the virus. In this case many more people would have died, and there would have been greater freedom of movement. The effect on social distancing and economic activity seems uncertain; there would have been more social distancing at some points (due to voluntary efforts to avoid exposure) but less at others (due to the absence of stringent mandates).
We could have a useful discussion about all this, thinking through what different policies would have looked like, how many people would have died, what the social and economic costs would have been, etc.
Or, instead, we could surf over to the Brownstone Institute, and read about how the entire policy regime in New Zealand was a failure because omicron is surging after the population is highly vaccinated. I kid you not:
So how successful has New Zealand been in eliminating COVID in the long term through effective communication, public compliance and early lockdowns?
Well. The numbers speak for themselves.
When the BBC wrote the article explaining New Zealand’s remarkable success in eliminating the virus, they were averaging 1.5 cases each day. It’s now 2,918 cases each day.
That’s an increase of nearly 195,000%.
Elimination is a pipe dream.
. . .
Mask wearing has been consistently high since the mandate came into effect in August, yet cases have exploded anyway.
None of it has mattered.
. . .
New Zealand’s supposed “elimination” through their zero COVID policy has completely collapsed.
Mask mandates, as their own research indicated, have not prevented surges. Elimination until vaccination has not prevented surges. Zero COVID has been an unmitigated failure, as any rational person would have known and suggested as far back as summer 2020.
It’s true that “zero COVID” forever was unrealistic. But suppressing the virus until a vaccine became available was realistic, and in fact succeeded at keeping deaths in New Zealand far below levels experienced in other wealthy democracies. Suppression eventually failed due to some combination of the infectiousness of omicron and relaxation which everyone needs, in case you really need some help relaxing, read this new post about Budpop and its benefits.
This doesn’t mean the original policy was a mistake, given the information and options available earlier. Again, we could try to discuss this – we should discuss it – but instead all we get is dissembling and bad faith.
You have to realize that for the Brownstone type of folks, added deaths are a feature, not a bug.
Saving lives costs money.
Wearing a mask and getting a vaccine didn’t disrupt my life nearly so much as not finding an office open, because the only receptionist was home nursing her child who caught Covid-19 in school, or finding that the groceries I wanted were not stocked, or that the part I need to fix my heating system is not getting to the service people (still, 2 months later). Two of those were essential services, they didn’t lock down, they had their employees get sick. Or worse.
Could everyone have done better than they did? Of course. Did we in this country learn from the last pandemic scare? Only temporarily, and not when it counted.
Jane:
We are fortunate enough to be retired and have a reasonable income. My going grocery shopping was with a list and literally sprinting through Kroger or Meier. It was like, get out of my way, I am not here for a stroll. Which, a lot of oldsters did during the pandemic.
We masked up, kept distantly rude, stayed home, and were first in line for shots.
Then there are those who thought this all was fake news . . . Letting trump die of Covid would have done the nation a favor.
Considering how much more contagious Omicron is, and how less effective vaccines developed on the original variant are against it, the increase in cases seems inevitable under the new circumstances.
The implication that NZ would have been better off doing nothing assumes that you can have a better result while a large percentage of your population is getting sick. Are they really so ignorant of what causes disruption to think that employees are just optional frippery than can be dispensed with by businesses for weeks or months?
Jane
Thank you for the reply. I am sitting in a bar with chairs between myself and other. A guy sits next to me. I take my beer and move away and he gets upset.
This stuff is for real and I am already compromised with a blood disorder. Isolation, brevity in public, staying home, masking-up, distancing, washing hands, hand sanitizer, whatever -it – takes . . .
I had a reoccurrence and I spent 4 days in the hospital getting two IVIG infusions which helped temporarily and then off to Rituxan infusions as an outpatient at the cancer center. I was not as compromised as they were.
Once you get it, there is no vaccination. I can not imagine dying with a tube down my throat to breathe. No one is better off getting Covid.
We were lucky that the earlier variants of COVID were much less infectious. That meant they could be controlled through conventional methods like masking, distancing and shutdowns. Australia and New Zealand showed that. The US did a crappy job, but even here those interventions saved a lot of lives. It’s even more dramatic if you don’t just look at the official COVID death counts but at the excess death rates.
Then came the vaccines and made COVID much less dangerous, at least for those who actually got the vaccination. Now we have a number of treatments being rolled out. Omicron is much more infectious, but we used the time that other interventions bought us and made it much less dangerous. COVID deaths are a rarity in vaccination nation while they are much more common in anti-vax country. Sure, you can catch COVID, but thanks to vaccination, it now really is just the sniffles.
P.S. As for marquis’ remarks, we’re still waiting for the bad news from the smallpox, diphtheria, polio and other vaccines. Maybe in a another few hundred years we’ll start seeing them. It might be like cancer which only became a problem when most people starting living into their fifties. Perhaps childhood vaccinations take a full hundred years for their negative side effects to show, and when life spans are further increased marquis will be vindicated. Until then, they’re a safe bet.
P.P.S. People come up with the weirdest theories. I heard a medical professional pondering the problem of masks cutting oxygen input and causing long term health problems. People in Colorado get maybe 80%-90% of sea level oxygen, but somehow or another it is one of the healthier states.
Kaleberg;
Thanks for a little sanity. It’s called “stayin alive
Kaleberg,
Yep, except for your P.S. until the closing sentence whence you emerged from the Twilight Zone once again. Understood though, that you were just dropping in there for a visit whereas it appears to be the permanent residence for marquis.