I'm betting (Australia) has it beaten

The Quarantine Zone
161

…the two aren’t in conflict.

We have never had a policy of indefinite policy of lockdowns, and we won’t have a policy of indefinite lockdowns. I’m not sure why you aren’t understanding what I said. We have targeted localized lockdowns, and we use them to isolate the potential infected, to allow time for our contact tracing team to identify transmission chains and to ring-fence the outbreak.

New Zealanders overwhelmingly support this: it’s been shown in every poll, it was reflected at the last election.

It comes down to this: what you think we are doing and what we actually are doing are two different things. I’m happy to expand on anything you want me to expand on if you like. But the words “indefinite lockdown” and “New Zealand” really don’t belong in the same sentence. Because it isn’t a thing that we do.

We all want to avoid lockdowns. But lockdowns are also an effective tool for controlling an outbreak, and we won’t rule them out.

You are saying things that are either incorrect or that I disagree with, and all I’m doing is pointing them out.

162

@Novelty_Bobble, you’ve strongly implied that NZ’s plan is hopeless in the long-term and that inevitably they are going to have to give up. That’s not charitable.

@Banquet_Bear, @Novelty_Bobble keeps talking about “Lockdowns” but I think the real issue is the lockdown on international travel.

I think we can all agree that NZ will probably face a choice at some point between allowing COVID in when it’s reached a more innocuous form (that is, vaccines are widespread enough that they decide it’s okay to have COVID circulating, as it’s not really dangerous anymore) or they will have to forever continue to aggressively isolate/screen/monitor anyone who enters the country from areas where COVID is endemic.

I believe @Novelty_Bobble is just assuming that isolation of all travelers can’t continue, and @Banquet_Bear is assuming it can.

163

Moderating:

Due to a flag, I have just slogged through a lot of this thread to try and determine where it has gone off the rails.

I think @MandaJo has stated it well.

I read @Banquet_Bear’s responses closely and I do not see hostility, only a desire to clarify what New Zealand is doing.

@Novelty_Bobble, I’m not sure why you are taking such combative positions, but this is a note to suggest that you read more carefully and with a more charitable perspective.

I urge both participants in this thread hijack to carry on their discussions only to the extent that they relate to the topic at hand – which is what Australia is doing, not New Zealand.

No warning, only guidance.

164

If I were going to criticise NZ I’d do so. No searching for implied meaning would be needed. You’ve re-stated my words as “hopeless” and “give up” when that is not what I said and nowhere near what I mean.

I’ll go further. NZ have handled the situation brilliantly and continue to do so.
Nothing in what I wrote suggests otherwise.

My point is and always was, that there will come a point for NZ, (just as there is for every country), where the presence of some level of the virus in population is pretty much guaranteed and that repeated lockdowns in response to that will at some point tax the patience of the population.

That says nothing about when that point is reached. It definitely isn’t saying that that time has arrived now and nor can that reasonably be taken as a implied criticism of NZ’s now or previously.

Hell, even the NZ government is stating that whatever route they choose they want to avoid lockdowns.

165

Is there? It seems like if they maintain their entrance limits, they could do this forever. They aren’t having lockdowns.

166

That’s kind of the point though. Maintaining the strict rules is what has allowed NZ to avoid lockdowns to a great extent and yes keeping those in place forever is an option. I’d question though if that fulfills my original caveat of “returning to normal”.

Loosening them however, is something which the NZ governement are looking to do in a bid to open back up externally. Fine, do it in a controlled and gradual way, that is entirely sensible.

What that is guaranteed to do is allow more virus into the population. Unless those restrictions were actually ineffectve a rise will occur. That will happen, just as it has everywhere else in the world. The measures taken when that happens are varied and indeed they can include local or national lockdowns but…and here is my entire point…at some point the population will stop accepting that as proportional response. Especially when (as you alluded to) you have a vaccinated population or one that in some other way is less at risk from death and serious disease.

167

Your whole argument assumes the premise that this is impossible, but you haven’t really demonstrated that. You’ve left out “Given that NZ can’t keep strict border controls in place forever” and jumped to the assumption that constant rolling lockdowns are therefore the only available alternative.

168

That what is impossible?

169

Keeping strict border controls forever.

170

It is possible to keep strict border controls forever, it is not possible to keep strict border controls forever and claim that represents a return to normality.

171

Well, that should be your conversation with @Banquet_Bear, because that’s the actual cause of disagreement here.

172

That ship has sailed and my hijack with them has been ruled off limits so I’m taking it no further.
I clearly stated the caveat about “something approaching a normal life” in my very first post. Sure, if that is not the direction a country wants to go then strict border controls can remain.

173

Just to get back to Australia here…

I would love to know what it is that NZ is doing different from the Australian authorities, because it seems to be more successful than the Australian one, and yet it seems from my POV that the strategy is the same - the base rate of covid in the community is zero, travellers arrive from overseas in a steady stream and go through quarantine, occasionally it escapes from quarantine and we stamp it back to zero again. NZ seems to have had a whole lot fewer escapes while maintaining a much less restrictive entry policy - I don’t know what’s up with that, though I guess it means our quarantine system is kinda sucky (putting people in hotels in the middle of the city has never made any sense at all to me)

The big question is not whether we can keep this up for ever, because clearly we can - and I would rather have lived here this past year with essential normality punctuated with occasional sitting at home weeks (rather than low-grade mask-wearing social-distancing minor misery all the time). The big question is at what point we decide it’s not worth it any more, because “zero covid” to “any covid” is a big transition, and “zero covid” is only a strategy that can happen if we all work together. The vast majority of people were willing to work together for a disease with an IFR somewhere in the 0.5 - 1 percent kind of range, but as vaccination increases, that goes way down. At some point we’re going to hit a threshold where most people don’t think it’s worth it and yes, that is going to be an uncomfortable switch.

We have an actual strategy now, handed down by ScoMo, which is “no more lockdowns when vaccination is 70%, free travel when it’s 80%”. Only the second of these is a thing he’s actually in charge of since the states control the first, so we may be heading for a little angst at that point, but hopefully there’s not a huge amount of time between hitting the first benchmark and the second.

174

I think we (NZ) have been lucky, but also my perception is that we lockdown harder and faster when necessary. The moment we have mystery transmission we lockdown, you guys seems to take a few days. That said, I think NZ has been too slow to close the trans-Tasman bubble in the past but I think the lesson has been learned.

Do we have a less restrictive entry policy? I’m not aware of what Australia’s is.

175

Each state has an arrivals cap. When there’s an outbreak, they tend to shift it down. The big difference I believe is that just being an Australian citizen doesn’t mean you can get on a plane - you have to get a spot in the arrivals quota for that week. That has, at points, been pretty difficult - I’m not exactly sure what the pressure is like at the moment. AFAIK, NZ citizens can come back to NZ any time - right?

176

No, they need to be able to get a room in a quarantine hotel. It’s a bone of contention at the moment because the rooms book out immediately they are released. There is no waitlist system so it’s just luck whether you happen to be able to get a spot.

177

The first big Aussie outbreak was the cruise ship. NZ was lucky on that one: I assume they would have had the same media stupidity, ('They should have remained on the ship! Nobody said that! - just that they should have not been allowed ashore! There are now more cases than were on the cruise ship! etc) but I don’t know if they would have had the same quarantine failure. This was less important than was reported, but it had a big effect on public perception.

There is a state/federal split here. The federal government is legally responsible for quarantine. After a long period of other priorities, the quarantine responsibility was handled by the agriculture department, located in a rural city. When the cruise ship arrived, none of the people in Sidney had legal responsibility, or even knew who had legal responsibility (just “somebody else”). Even if somebody had thought of the agriculture department, they wouldn’t have had anybody accustomed to handling cruise ships.

If an infected cruise ship full of NZ citizens had landed in NZ, perhaps somebody would have had some idea how to handle it. Or perhaps not: it’s been a long time since 1919.

If my dates are right, NZ closed the border March 19, and Australia closed the border gradually from Feb 1 to March 20, so I don’t see a big difference there.

NZ did pre-purchase agreements with 4 international vaccine companies.

Aus chose Pfizer, AZ and two (??) local vaccines. The local vaccines didn’t make the cut, and there was no extra Pfizer available: Aus was unlucky with supply, NZ was lucky ??

Aus made a political decision a year ago not to fund mRNA manufacture. The government has changed it’s mind. I’ve heard private argument that the first decision was bad, not just in retrospect, but the reasons given having nothing to do with vaccine supply today or over the last 18 months. NZ made the decision 6 months earlier: I don’t think they had an existing industry ?? Which is probably why Australia said no, and took an extra 6 months, but again, I don’t think it has anything to do with the present situation.

The Australian/International supply chain has run out of low-volume syringes and needles, which has an effect on vaccine availability that is not discussed here or in NZ. I don’t know if NZ managed to avoid that.

178

Logically, hotel quarantine is only effective when the rate of infection inside of the hotel is much, much greater than the rate of infection outside of the hotel. Sydney, whilst it is in the middle of an outbreak and the entire city is locked down, could fairly risk free move to a model where incoming travellers coming from countries with low COVID rates could choose to quarantine at home while scarce hotel spots are reserved for higher risk travellers. This would allow it to clear a lot of the backlog that’s been building up whilst also not meaningfully increasing risk.

Of course, politically, this is a no go so it’s never going to happen, just like last year when Melbourne was getting 700+ cases a day and 10,000s of Australians that were close contacts of confirmed cases were permitted to quarantine at home under the honor system but inbound travellers were still locked under guard in hotel rooms.

179

OWID currently has 20% of Aus fully vaccinated vs 18% NZ and 37% Aus partially vaxxed vs 30% NZ. Australia has been consistently 5 points ahead of NZ at every point on the curve so I’m not sure under what rubric you would categorize NZ as lucky with its supply.

180

This is the model NZ intends to move to next year once a good portion of the population is vaccinated.

And yes, NZ’s vaccination rate is poor despite having good supply. I think we were guilty of over thinking it. Just hold mass vaccinations for anyone who wants to come, that will protect the vulnerable just as well as specifically targeting them for vaccination.