Or else it’s seasonal, they are doing a good job if it turns out we can get a vaccine before their winter. If not what are they going to do stay in lockdown for years?
Let’s make it happen.
Your issue seems to be travel.
As I said, Ireland has 3% of its cases from travel. NZ only closed their borders 7 weeks after their first official case and months after we know this came into Asia and Europe.
NZ has community spread and clusters as well. One cluster is from a bar celebrating St Patrick’s Day is Matamata. 76 people got it there. Ireland’s bars were closed by then. Is that an indicator of a strong measure?
NZ simply appears to have avoided the levels of community and clusters of other areas after the virus got in. What specific measures to tackle community outbreak did you prefer there vs Ireland?
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The emerging evidence of this suggests a flu like pattern to this. UV seems to be is a significant help in reducing spread.
NZ and Australia, being in late summer when this broke out in Europe was clearly a big help. As was population density. Density and people not using mass transit systems appears to be a great help.
Low population density helping stop the spreading of a virus?’
Here is the detail of the Matamanta cluster. This was from a bar open for Patrick’s Day, after ours were closed;
Yes.
Really Tim, you place faith in that 3% figure? Which model did they use to pluck that figure from?
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Who’d have thought it?
Anyway whether closing the borders was the way to go or not, that ship has sailed now. Our only option is to pursue a gradual reopening, hoping the cases stay low enough that our health service (normally overwhelmed every time it’s a bit cold cc Simon Harris) can manage, whilst guarding our elderly.
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That’s how they have presented the numbers.
A donkey can tell you it entered from travel originally, but the real point is on community transmission. NZ had that, including clusters- nearly half of cases. I posted the example of a bar, on St Patrick’s Day. A traveller brought it in and 76 people got it.
The great victory NZ are claiming is with regards to suppressing community transmission. That is largely down to internal social distancing measures. What specific ones did you prefer? Was it keeping their bars open later than we did?
With a Ro so high the ultimate issue will always be community transmission and that appears throughout all the countries with this.
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You place full faith in that 3% figure?
Tim do you honestly think the fg government based on advice from the top medical professionals are making this much of a monumental fuck up in continuing the lockdown when there’s no need? Or do you think there’s some doubt even which course of action is the right one?
Keeping them closed looks more beneficial from a containment from a second surge point of view. Easier to control people inside the system we are setting up from a contact tracing and testing perspective. Sustaining that globally will be impossible. People have a right to travel home.
The reality is that NZ still had lots of imported cases and lots of those people managed to not get picked up at borders and spread it in the community. They avoided community spread largely which is their great success.
What was NZ’s figure for travel related transmission?
Mike hunt taking an awful battering all morning.
I think the fact that they are a “caretaker” government impacts things. I think they are acting with extreme caution due to that.
I think our culture also leads to people not seeing the big picture and that any deaths subsequent to easing of a lockdown, even one, will be blamed on easing restrictions.
I do also think there is an element of doubling down on the decision, an “escalation of commitment”, as described here;
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There’s inevitably going to be deaths after the reopening and people will blame the government for that.
Thankfully a lot of the head guys tackling this have already had plenty of experience defending/excusing deaths due to government actions
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So 70% of NZs are travel related and Ireland are saying it’s only 3%. Am I reading this right?
For all the talk of the “second wave”, there’s an increasing body of thought that this IS, in fact, the second wave. This started last December despite the contrary spin of the junta. People got ill, some sadly died, many more recovered. The junta have a lot of explaining to do.
We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
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