Re:R number for UK below 1 for first time since August
by bb123 on Saturday November 28, 2020 @02:28PM
(#25239809)
You're right, I grabbed the absolute numbers by mistake. I'm not sure it dilutes the point as much as you are suggesting though. Absolute numbers do matter - as the difference is still huge (~10x). It a far harder problem to contain 10,000 infections than 1000 even in a country with resources because of the nature of exponential growth. Things are going to take off faster and more aggressively with a higher seed number, so even with proportionally the same resources, you have less time to react.
I actually never at any point said that I thought the UK was doing things well (I'm not from the UK). My point is that I don't think NZ's success was down especially to brilliant leadership so much as a combination of factors that make it a uniquely hard place for a disease like COVID to enter and spread.
> Sure, source https://www.citypopulation.de/en/world/bymap/AirTrafficPasse...
If you order that list by ‘per capita’ NZ is way above the UK, 13th versus 24th. I think you have misread it and got the absolute number of travellers.
> The degree to which the UK is connected to the world is just on a different scale to New Zealand.
In absolute numbers, yes, per capita, no. With covid the thing that matters is people coming into contact. The ratio tourists/population matters. NZ has a lot of travel and relative to it’s population, a lot more than the UK. And NZs population travel a lot more.
> I don’t believe the tourism argument holds up in the slightest either.
How so? Tourists bring in covid.
If you look at things relative to the population, NZ has a lot of people moving a lot of the time.
NZ may be a small, far away islands (it’s bigger than the UK geographically), but the approach NZ used wasn’t invented here and is not novel. It was copied from others that had success. Interestingly, a lot of good policy came from South Korea. South Korea copied it from the NHS. Others have had good results too, NZ is not alone at any stretch and did not pioneer it’s policies.
I’m sure there are other factors and many of them. However the UK leaders have not done well and have contributed hugely to the problems. The ignoring of advice from experts is incredible - why set up systems if you don’t want them? They continue to ignore the most basic advice and get exactly the outcome one would expect, covid.