As a New Zealander my opinion on the government changed for the better after the pandemic. They listened to health professionals and implemented their advice. Far too many governments have industry in their ear overriding anything else. In a twist of irony, our economy is going to pick up faster than other countries as a result.
As your cousin across the ditch, I feel similarly about our government. People prepared for the worst, and their preparation seems to have so far prevented the worst.
I hope Australia can follow you eventually, or at least keep things at a low level
> We will still see cases…but only cases in people who have arrived from overseas.” Travellers from abroad will be quarantined as part of efforts to prevent transmission in New Zealand.
> As New Zealand now eases its restrictions and its economy slowly reopens, there are discussions about how it can open up its borders while ensuring that everyone is protected
What's the end-game here, assuming the disease goes endemic in the rest of the world (as seems likely)
That's a large figure, but it's not as if New Zealand lacks any kind of other industry. There's a massive primary industries (dairy, meat, logging, wine, plus others) where the country hasn't yet fully exploited it's opportunities yet for secondary value-add processing.
As a completely anecdotal observation, most tourists go to the South Island, where roughly a fifth of the population lives. The North Island is four times as densely populated. This disparity sometimes leads people to believe that country is entirely dependant on tourism, with a few sheep thrown in.
>That's a large figure, but it's not as if New Zealand lacks any kind of other industry
It's also 15% of employment though, which isn't surprising because there's a lot of low wage service work done in that sector, it employs a huge chunk of the population.
For reference, both in terms of GDP contribution and employment that is larger than the contribution of the entire automotive industry to Germany.
And being German and seeing how people are starting to get worried about the economy, I can't see this working long term politically.
If you tell people in the tourism industry they now need to become dairy farmers at the other end of the country I think you'll be surprised how quickly the country opens up again.
I'd imagine a big issue would be dealing with shipping and business travel, besides having to write off 6% of your GDP. The disease spreads so rapidly, one case of a dock yard worker coming into close contact with a crew member, or a surface they touched, and commutes by bus each day, and you lock down your whole country again.
New Zealanders will be able to patronize their own tourist industry, as a start. Then there is talk of allowing travel between Australia and New Zealand, because Australia also has low case numbers. Other countries also are getting to low case numbers, so those could also be added to the list in time.
Maybe even tourists "from anywhere" could be allowed to visit if they just agree to isolate upon entry for N days first. Private hotels and resorts could offer isolation packages. For many tourists, travelling to New Zealand is already expensive so they usually come for longer because it's a once-in-a-lifetime trip... adding N days of isolation to the start of the trip might not be so bad, especially if there are good deals to be had.
For me, the biggest question is whether visitors will be able to get travel / health insurance to cover them in New Zealand. I suppose the New Zealand government could sell such insurance, or they could back a private insurer.
Years ago I used to spend time in NZ when I was part of the US Antarctic program which stages out of Christchurch. In the late 90's when I was going down there, one of the airlines had my favorite promotion ever: for NZ$99 (about USD$59) they would give you a round trip ticket to somewhere. You'd find out where you were going after you bought the ticket, and they'd guarantee it was a same day round trip. I always thought what an incredibly fun and cheap way to spend the day in a beautiful country.
One of our larger markets is Australia, so we're looking at establishing a trans-Tasman "bubble", when they get it under control too. Other countries would be added based on their status - Taiwan has been mentioned.
But who knows, we could see a large upsurge in domestic tourism given our lack of foreign travel options - although that would require some pain in our tourism industry, as prices tend to be considered excessive by Kiwis.
In 2018 domestic tourism was $23B, international $17B (excluding airfares). So we were already more than half domestic. Since international travel is severely restricted now, expect domestic tourism to increase. Australia was more than half of our inbound international tourism, and there's a good chance we'll be able to resume that. So the tourism industry will suffer but it need not collapse.
If there ends up being a NZ-AU bubble, as is being talked about, that is likely to allow some tourism. That might grow to include other Asia Pacific counties with good virus stats.
It doesn't have to be incredibly sustainable. It only has to hold up until there's a treatment or a vaccine available. Since there's not really any tourism happening for a while anyway, NZ will be relatively fine for a long time with this strategy.
New Zealand has vast natural resources and a very small population. They will be fine without tourism. Of course it will have an impact... you'll see more people on old Androids than iPhone 11 but they will be fine.
Hmm, mainly water and soil tbh. We're not exactly flush with mineral deposits - a few gold mines here and there, but most of our coal deposits are low quality lignite, and our current government has already signalled where we're heading by banning new offshore oil/gas permits.
That said, we have a strong software development scene, and I'd like to see that grow more.
> What's the end-game here, assuming the disease goes endemic in the rest of the world (as seems likely)
Test and trace. With cases near zero, it's very feasible to test every inbound flight (or require test results from the passengers) and every potential contact of every new case. When the likelihood of an infected person going undetected goes down far enough, R0 goes from >1 to <1 and outbreaks shrink over time instead of spreading.
This works. It's not cheap, but it's a lot better than trying to ration hospital resources in a pandemic outbreak.
Only if those tests aren't more valuably deployed for some other purpose. Nothing in epidemic control is about perfection. You'll never be able to catch every single transmission. The goal is to reduce the average rate of transmission among the whole population, such that the average number of people infected by one new case (the "R0" number that keeps getting thrown around) goes below one. Once you do that, you win.
I won't go endemic in the rest of the world because countries with competent governments are going to eliminate covid19. Leaving the US and couple of other fucked up countries as pariahs.
Have a normal life within the country, and possibly also a trans-tasman bubble including Australia and perhaps the Pacific Islands, assuming they can keep it under control too. Anyone not coming from those areas has mandatory 2 week managed quarantine. Then wait for a vaccine.
I didn't see the article as disagreeing with the headline. I thought the headline was using "eliminated" in the epidemiological sense:
"Elimination to everyone means that it is gone. But in epidemiological terms, it means bringing cases down to zero or near zero in a geographical location."
I can appreciate that, there’s just been enough confusion around the meaning of elimination that I feel a lot of people will just assume we’re done with it.
I don’t think the headline should be changed unless the article title changes, more just that if their goal is science communication I think they’ve done a poor job of it.
“New Zealand on the cusp of Covid-19 Elimination” might be a better term.
Also, our government hasn’t specified what threshold would be considered elimination so the latter part of that definition isn’t super helpful.
Again, I see what you're saying. However, isn't it bad form because it may alter the meaning and hence, mislead? Then why would the converse - leaving it alone and hence, mislead - also not be bad form?
The link and (HN) title are presented to the HN readership, if it is followed then the article's own title will be presented in the correct context.
Regardless, this is a minor point and I'll quibble no further.
New Zealand is as close to "contained" as is possible to get without a vaccine. Pop the cork, for goodness sake. There's not a lot of good news to go around.
Taiwan is actually at 26 days of no local cases as of today.
To your quarantine question, we currently only allow citizens to fly into Taiwan and those visitors have a mandated and tracked quarantine for them and anyone in the private home they are staying. If they have symptoms or do not have a private home they can quarantine, there are quarantine hotels they can wait out their 14 days. Anyone in quarantine is given a daily stipend.
Worth noting, while Taiwan is an island, it has a population density as high as 10,000 per square/KM in some areas. Taiwan had no business, school campus or public transportation shut downs. Strictly masks, hand washing, temperature checks, and social distancing.
For context, on 8th March (the date of the Newtown festival) there had been a cumulative 224 tests undertaken and only 5 positive results, all of which were linked to recent overseas travel. [1]
Through what seems to be sheer luck, NZ managed to avoid importing any cases from China during the "first wave", and it wasn't until the outbreaks took hold in Iran, Italy, and New York that we began to see our first imported cases -- starting with our first case on February 28th, where the source of infection was Iran. (It's important to note that by the time the first case was detected, nearly 200 tests had already been performed -- all were negative.)
However the number of cases arriving from overseas began to ramp up incredibly fast in the following two weeks, during which time a series of increasingly severe border restrictions were introduced starting on the 16th of March, and finally culminating in the full Level 4 lockdown starting on the 26th. At the announcement of the lockdown (on the 23th) New Zealand had a total of just 102 cases [2].
For comparison, New York stay at home order went live on March 22 when they had 7000 cases while for New Zealand it was 500 cases on march 28 when the order went into effect.
It's important to note that the term "eliminated" does not mean that we have no cases of Covid-19. The govt uses terms like "eliminated" and "eradicated" to mean different things with subtle differences, so they can be used to measure progress. From the article (in case you didn't read) "Elimination to everyone means that it is gone. But in epidemiological terms, it means bringing cases down to zero or near zero in a geographical location"
People seem to forget that in this area of the world, the yearly season for corona viruses starts in June... Same for Australia.
So unless they can maintain this type of lockdown for the next 6 months, they will see a resurgence, just as they see every year corona viruses spread starting in June.
A lot probably has to do with temperature and general climate.
I ironically think that Europe and US east coast may be in the best position, they went through hell and some of their areas are probably very close to herd immunity.
> So unless they can maintain this type of lockdown for the next 6 months, they will see a resurgence, just as they see every year corona viruses spread starting in June.
The difference is, is that most corona viruses are present all year round, and in significant numbers.
Provided the border remains secure (easy enough on a remote island with only a few international airports), and the existing cases are allowed to burn out, with effectively zero cases remaining by the time we reach "normal", I don't see a resurgence over winter as being that likely.
As a bonus, due to lock down, our influenza numbers are also hugely down as compared to most years. Whilst this absolutely won't be eliminated, I do expect numbers through out winter to remain lower than normal because of the severe reduction in numbers at the start of winter.
Don't think so. Testing on entry doesn't really help because the tourist could be incubating the virus. We have to quarantine and not many tourists want to spend the first two weeks of their holiday locked in a hotel room.
In the medium term the main hope for tourism is a) domestic and b) Australia also achieving elimination and opening our border to them.
There might also be some creative options to explore. E.g. let people pay big $$$ to be whisked away to an isolated luxury lodge (government approved!) for the first two weeks of their holiday.
Huh, with enough testing kits (and 2 day turnaround time on them?), why not test every arriving tourist, and quarantine them for 2 days until their test returns negative. Of course there's a danger that they get infected between the test and the quarantine (e.g. they share a bus to the quarantine location with an infected), so if someone you may have come into contact with is infected, then your 2 day quarantine becomes a 14 day one (or can they retest you on e.g. day 4 and let you go on day 6?)
It might be the case that a seven day quarantine with a test on the fifth day (for example) would be enough, but I imagine their government would want to see data confirming that.
It's probably not the case that someone can be tested on arrival and assumed not to be incubating the virus at as-of-yet undetectable levels.
It seems like it would be a good idea to test people on arrival and before leaving quarantine, AND quarantine them for 14 days. I think China does this, and I think NZ doesn't, and I don't know why we don't.
Mostly, wealthy Americans just applied for (and received) NZ passports and maybe bought a house "just in case."
You can look at aerial photos of the few airports in NZ to see if their private jets are still parked there.
Because until fairly recently small houses sold for $50,000 in NZ, and obviously foreign money would jack those prices up, the NZ govt. started talking about making their passports harder to obtain.
They also currently require a "travel document" from Americans, to reciprocate for US entry policy:
> Siouxsie Wiles, associate professor and head of the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland...
So this is totally off topic, but is the spelling of her name Siouxsie common in NZ or maybe Australia or elsewhere? I've only seen Siouxsie spelled that way once, so I'm just curious if she was maybe named after Siouxsie Sioux or this is a common spelling that I've just never seen.
1) Multiple small islands, thanks, that together approach the size of Great Britain.
2) A small island nation with large amounts of of foreign tourists
You make it sound we live on Pitcairn Island, which is rather overly simplistic.
IMO, it was the timing of our lockdown - we went into lockdown before community transmission was established, which kept it limited to clusters.
(I'm Australian, and very much pro-NZ except for when a cricket match is being played).
NZ has 7.3% of UK's population.
Auckland has about 1/4 the population density of London's.
NZ's airports have have approx 7% the number of annual passenger movements as UK, and that's before you count the significant numbers of travellers who enter the UK by road or rail.
When the virus started to spread internationally, NZ and Australia were in summer and early autumn, whereas London in recent months has had the same cool winter/early spring conditions that Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Korea and northern US have had when their outbreaks were most severe.
I agree NZ and Australia have done well to contain our outbreaks.
But we've been aided by infinitely more favourable conditions than the UK and US.
Well, at least you didn't have an open border with one of the latest countries to lock down in Europe, like we did in Ireland.
Unfortunately, we can't close the border with Northern Ireland for political reasons, so it looks like the island of Ireland won't be able to eliminate Covid-19.
To be fair, we should have stopped inbound/outbound travel much earlier (like NZ did) but I suspect concerns around EU law may have driven that.
The US government reacted pretty quickly. They closed travel from China on January 31st. When the US had just 7 known cases. That was like a week (or a day?) after World Health Organization wrote on their website that travel shouldn't be banned because of this virus.
This is absurd. The US did exactly one of the many things that were required, and then did nothing else for a full month. Other countries did more of what was required early and defeated the virus.
This is exactly the sentiment of the parent comment. How can we let the US leadership off the hook by just shrugging and saying, hey, they did slightly more than absolutely nothing. This was avoidable and the US did not take the well-understood public health measures required to avoid it.
Name one, just one country comparable to the US in population and the mobility of their population that did well. Once the virus got in, and remained undetected for a few weeks, it's too late to trace it like they did in South Korea (a tiny country with a very homogeneous population).
It's easy to judge it in hindsight, but think of it from US or most EU countries' governments perspective. You got barely any infections locally. The number of infections in China at the end of January was under 10K (a country with the population of over a billion). China just started their quarantine a week ago (23rd of Jan). Is it reasonable to quarantine the whole country at this point? I don't think so. Italy waited for a whole month to start theirs.
What is a reasonable set of actions in this scenario, in your opinion?
One country? Brazil. 200 million people. We started lockdowns very early when there were very few cases. The usually very busy streets outside my apartment have been mostly empty for well over two months now. I've lost track. But not of the fact that we have a fraction of the deaths that the US has had. No thanks to the president here, but thankfully the vast majority of people here are ignoring him and following the advice of state and city leaders.
Why, when the virus had circulating for weeks, did we only have 7 confirmed cases? Because the CDC massively messed up the testing regime on several levels: only testing people with travel or links to travel, not having nearly enough tests due to major slip-ups in development, etc.
Why was the CDC such a disaster this time? We don’t really know yet, but there was clearly a failure of leadership there. I don’t know whether Trump is to blame or not, but the Republican denigration of government as ineffective appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
IMO the key issue that caused it to spread so much in the US is there weren't restrictions on mobility. If borders were closed between states, and stricter lockdowns were put in place in hot spots, it could have been controlled.
A lot of smaller European countries are starting to get to the same point as NZ because that's exactly what they did - they restricted travel between borders and required any citizens returning home to self-quarantine. In a lot of places people regularly travel across borders for work, shopping, leisure etc, so Europe as a whole can be compared to the US in this matter. In my country they did this before even the first death, and two months later life is now starting to return to normal.
Along the same lines, it's not surprising that larger countries like Italy, Spain, France and the UK have a worse outbreak, as they put few restrictions on travel domestically and what they did was too late.
The US reaction has been abysmal to the extreme. The response looks more like a satire of epidemiology in a farce movie.
The level of testing is still not where it needs to be and PPE is still in short supply. The ban on China only applied to Chinese nationals. Most of the cases on the east coast had their origin in Europe.
The federal response has been keystone cops level of chaotic with mixed messaging, deflection, downplaying alternately at every turn. The re-opening of states shows every indication of going exactly as well, and a lot of it appears to be driven by political pressure rather than science.
> The travel shutdown from China wad probably a random act of racism and not a coherently planned action
I think it was more about punishing countries that aren't so friendly. China and Iran got travel restrictions pretty quickly. Italy, South Korea and Japan took a lot longer.
I am not sure why you are getting so much heat for this. There are several countries, including some with land borders, that have successfully reduced new cases to a trickle. There's ample evidence that severe restrictions can basically eliminate Covid-19 spread.
> This was avoidable. Tens of thousands of deaths were avoidable.
This is not really accurate. Also, looking at NZ is misleading -- they're a waterlocked island with fairly restrictive travel even prior to COVID-19. It would have been very difficult to contain something as contagious as COVID-19 even with better leadership from the WHO, US, China, Trump, Obama (insert whomever you blame the most). In fact, there may be some evidence that it was spreading in France as early as December 2019.
New Zealand had over 250,000 foreign visitors(excluding Oceania) in Jan 2020, and over 2.1 million in the Year ending December.
How does this compare with the countries that didn't avoid mass deaths?
Here is a list of places visitor came from:
Asia
China, People's Republic of
Hong Kong (SAR)
Indonesia
India
Japan
Korea, Republic of
Malaysia
Philippines
Singapore
Thailand
Taiwan
Viet Nam
Europe
Austria
Belgium
Switzerland
Germany
Denmark
Spain
France
United Kingdom
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Russia
Sweden
Americas
Argentina
Brazil
Canada
Chile
United States of America
Africa and the Middle East
United Arab Emirates
Israel
South Africa
I see this said a lot "New Zealand is a small island nation far from the world, so what works there is not applicable to other places" I never see anyone giving any evidence to this claim that there was not much travel to New Zealand. As far as I can see there was a lot of international visitors.
https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/international...
Being a tourist destination and having tight travel restrictions are not mutually exclusive by any stretch. Relative to any other western country I New Zealand has very strict customs (Only the US could compete and our our border screening is pretty pathetic when you start to look at it). Most of New Zealand's restrictions center around bio-controls/plant inspection, but consequently the country maintains a pretty comprehensive screening process. Also being surrounded by 1000 miles of Ocean means that it is pretty easy to monitor the three international airports in the country. (Relative to say the Netherlands which has trains arriving in from 5 different countries in the same custom's union every day).
5 :) 3 of them are limited in destinations, only Christchurch and Auckland go direct to places other than Australia or the Pacific islands (Wellington Airport's runway isn't long enough for the bigger planes), but a lot of people coming here will fly via Aussie anyway.
But I agree, we're definitely better placed in that regard, except we initially relied on self-isolation and well, that didn't work very well for us.
If we'd actually implemented stringent testing at the airports, or mandatory and enforced quarantine (not that we had the facilities to do so), then we possibly could have avoided the lockdowns altogether.
We closed the borders to all but citizens and permanent residents when we realised a fair proportion of tourists were ignoring the self-isolation requirements. One helicopter pilot at Franz Josef Glacier flew his passengers to the Police when they told him they'd just arrived in the country.
Not only did NZ get a lot of tourists, we also had a large diaspora who ran for home when the pandemic hit. In fact it's mostly the latter who imported COVID19 into NZ.
I'm not sure why you're singling out the US. The overwhelming majority of the countries didn't avoid it. And the ones that did, got lucky, either due to the low population density, or due to the travel patterns.
For the US to avoid it, they would have to shut down all travel at the beginning of January, when it was a small local infection. Once the infected Chinese people traveled to the US and Europe, it was game over. The numbers were small at first and mostly unknown, but that particular virus spreads so fast, within a month it became a problem, and within another month it became a huge problem.
To avoid it in Europe and the US, the countries would have to severely overreact based on some (seemingly) small stats. Do you really want to do mass-testing every time there's a random outbreak in some other part of the world? Do you want to manufacture tens of millions of new tests because a few thousand got infected in Timbuktu? Is that a realistic approach?
What we really need to concentrate on is the solution, which is biotech. We need to find an efficient way to stop viruses.
New Zealand didn't "avoid it" either. We closed down our border, went in to physical isolation for a long enough period to get things under control, and implemented both a testing regime and contact tracing. None of these have been cheap or easy.
Shutting down travel from China is exactly what the US should have done in January, as well as shutting down travel from anywhere that has a significant outbreak. Had we done that, we might have been able to contain the disease, or, at least limited the damage significantly. But, Trump was too busy painting it as a Democratic hoax to be bothered to do anything.
No. You don't understand. By the end of January the disease already spread to the US. It was in multiple random places. We knew of 7 cases, but by now we know there were tons more asymptomatic and barely symptomatic.
And stop spreading fake news, Trump has never claimed the virus was a democratic hoax. He said the politicization of it was. Why would he close travel from China if he thought it was a hoax? You don't even think your fake news through.
The disease was known to have pandemic potential for weeks before Trump did anything. He could have shut down travel in the beginning of January. But, he was too busy politicizing things himself, by calling Democratic criticism of his so called "response" a hoax. So, he waited until literally the last day of January to do anything. That's not fake news. That's reality.
Here are his actual words:
> Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
> One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.
The antecedent of "this" is "the virus." This is what he said, buddy. Why don't you think that through while the death toll keeps going up?
The US could have a) shut borders generally to every country reporting COVID19 outbreaks, not just to China b) had an early, coordinated nationwide hard lockdown for a few weeks at least to stop the spread and buy time to identify outbreaks so they could be snuffed out c) not ignored the CDC's testing failures d) gone big early to pay/coerce companies to massively scale up production of tests/PPE/ventilators (the latter not needed as it turns out, but we didn't know that).
Not very different from what NZ did. Probably would have worked, but even if not, at least it should have been tried.
Undetected spread and even quite large outbreaks can be contained and eliminated. NZ did it. Other countries did it. Trump didn't even try.
Look at gun violence. That’s someone that’s entirely of the US’ failing, but at levels that matter no one cares that thousands die because of inept government.
I doubt we'll see anyone held accountable. In most countries there were multiple failures that will let everyone successfully deflect the blame, often those failures were years ago and the people responsible are no longer around. From Trumps conspiratorial tweets, the CDC screwing up testing and being so insular, multiple world leaders urging everyone to go out and enjoy themselves a week before the lock downs started, universities encouraging their cash cows to avoid the China travel ban, politicians saying the travel ban was racist, the failure to ban travel from countries not already on the shit list, Top docs saying kids can't spread the virus, top docs saying face masks do nothing, outright denialism and conpiracies from the media, the WHO being cuckolded by the CCP. The list goes on.
So many were too worried about the economy and stock market to act but I'm convinced New Zealand's "go hard go early" approach will result in the best possible economic outcome.
> Covid-19 was developed by the Wuhan research lab.
“Developed by” and “released from” are two different things. It’s a fact that the lab was studying bat coronaviruses. It isn’t a huge stretch that improper procedures could have led to one of those viruses getting loose. That’s a subtle, but important nuance. If an outbreak of polio happened a few miles from the CDC in Atlanta, wouldn’t it be fair to suspect that the virus could have escaped from the CDC? It’s also a strange coincidence as to how many deadly pathogens have come from China in the last 20 years. When was the last time some significant, world altering virus originated in Belgium? China has several. And all relatively similar.
It might just be a coincidence, but in my years as an NBC officer in the US Army, I learned that coincidences, especially in these matters, is pretty rare.
Was it intentional? There is no evidence to suggest it was. Was it negligent? Possibly. Is China benefiting strategically? Definitely. Draw your own conclusions, but I would trust even Trump more than I would trust anything coming out of China — and that’s saying a lot. China is not much different philosophically than North Korea. China still teaches in their schools that the Korean War was started by a US invasion. I lived in China for many years; amazing people, extremely hostile government. Imagine living in a place where your phones are tapped and your internet activity is fed to the local office of the Ministry of State Security where you can be subject to questioning over anything even slightly “disruptive.” I was questioned once because I had accessed a video (over VPN!) of the Tiananmen Square event. The principle of the school I was at called me to his office to ask me “to not do that again please.”
There is nothing in China’s character that would suggest they should be trusted over anything. They lie about air quality readings for f-ks sake.
Let’s defund the WHO then. They were the ones promoting China’s straight up lies. Taiwan warned the WHO of human-to-human transmission in December. The WHO ignored it. They maintained that fiction for weeks. Who is the director of the WHO? The former foreign minister of Ethiopia. Who invested billions in projects in Ethiopia during his reign? China. To think that the foreign minister didn’t get personally enriched by the Chinese is beyond naïve. Anyone not think that there was a lot of “benefit of the doubt” happening between the WHO and China? Even when Trump restricted travel from China, the WHO was squawking about how that wasn’t necessary. Then a week later, every other country did it as well. Even the ACLU, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden were calling the travel restrictions “racist.” The US response was politicized from the beginning because “get Trump” was more important than the actual thing. Feb 24, Pelosi, live from San Francisco Chinatown was encouraging people to go visit the local restaurants. De Blasio in New York was telling people to go to shows in New York. What was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff doing in January? Using his committee to investigate impeachment rather than staying on top of the intelligence that his committee had access to. It’s literally his job to monitor intelligence developments that have a material impact on the US. CNN and all the other mainstream news outlets were calling this no worse than a flu in January and even into February. But let’s go ahead and assign blame to Trump for all of it. Literally every single action he took was met with vitriol and opposition. It didn’t matter what he did. If he called for a complete lockdown, Democrats would blame him for economic damage. If he didn’t, then he gets blamed for the deaths.
It’s my opinion that the seriousness of this whole affair will become forgotten by he day after the election. Some pretty evil people that would play politics with the lives and livelihood of Americans in an elaborate game of “get Trump.”
This whole affair has revealed some particularly vicious political evil.
> Testing has been focused on people with symptoms, with tracing of both close contacts and casual contacts. However, more widespread testing is now being introduced.
Might be a bit early to proclaim it’s been “eliminated” based on a single day of no new reported cases considering the asymptomatic aren’t widely being tested.
No new community transmission cases for weeks, all new cases linked to known clusters, and we're trending towards zero active cases nationwide -- every day for over a month there has been a decrease in active cases.
Someone with a better clinical understanding than I do can probably shed more light on this, but the NZ Director General of Health briefly touched on this, saying there is a difference between elimination and eradication in medical lingo. That may also apply to the Lancet article. I’ll try to find more later if no-one else answers this better.
That's right, and there was a brief controversy here when the Director General and the Prime Minister said that NZ had eliminated COVID and that was taken by most people to mean that it no longer existed here. They later had to backtrack somewhat and explain the difference.
Basically elimination means that the disease is totally under control, and any new cases can be dealt with via testing and tracing. Eradication means that the disease is completely wiped out and no longer exists here.
Elimination means removal of something. Eradication means it will never come back. So maybe they meant (or should have meant) that the risk of exponential spread has been eliminated.
Correct. The US has "eliminated" measles (since there are almost no cases and it's not difficult to contain), but the world has "eradicated" small pox (since the virus itself literally only exists in a couple of research labs in the entire world).
This is covered in the article, and I posted this comment above:
It's important to note that the term "eliminated" does not mean that we have no cases of Covid-19. The govt uses terms like "eliminated" and "eradicated" to mean different things with subtle differences, so they can be used to measure progress. From the article (in case you didn't read) "Elimination to everyone means that it is gone. But in epidemiological terms, it means bringing cases down to zero or near zero in a geographical location"
For the last few weeks there has been widespread testing of asymptomatic people. E.g. teams showing up at a supermarket and testing everyone, testing everyone associated with a school that had a pretty large cluster.
It is true that still most tests are on symptomatic people. But if there was undetected community transmission then you would expect some of those people to develop symptoms and eventually get tested and test positive. (Currently the PM is saying "if you have a sore throat or a sniffle, get tested" --- the bar for symptoms is extremely low.) So it's reasonable to assume that there isn't significant undetected community transmission.
