> "We go hard and we go early" works.

"We go hard and we go early" works *in a small, remote island nation that is willing to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of the world.

"small", "remote", and "island" aren't significant direct contributions here.

"seal" does -- whether any group is collectively capable of taking chain-of-exposure and its management seriously.

Make your island arbitrarily small and remote but have even a single person who's boating/flying or any kind of unmanaged travel outside the bubble regularly and you'll see infection overrun the island.

Pick an arbitrarily large city within miles of another on a shared continent with an unmanaged pandemic. Have it populated with people who are unified in careful contact management and they'll keep outbreaks scarce and small.

It's far easier to have a successful seal on a remote island than the Czech Republic or Alabama. Land borders are both more secure and more porous than you'd think.

What's Britains excuse? People swimming over from Calais to cough?

Nobody really needs to go to New Zealand unless they’re from there. London is an international hub for multiple industries. It’s much harder to prevent people from traveling there.

If this pandemic has taught us anything it's that hardly any of us need to go anywhere.

As modest as the NZ economy is it's still a hub for a few industries, and people still wanted to come for business purposes.

we never shut the airports (or the channel tunnel). If you arrived in the UK you were told to quarantine, but not made to.

Also our politicians are deeply incompetent and were the only ones in Europe (AFAIK) aiming for herd immunity right off the bat, until they eventually ran the numbers on death rates if the ICUs ran out of capacity and realised it was a terrible idea.

Right, so it's far more to do with institutions and policy than it is to do with how big an ocean you're in. NZ could have done the exact same thing - kept flights going, asked people politely to quarantine, etc.

Very true, but if you're a country with porous borders then it's going to be much harder to enforce. Border control is a prerequisite to enforcing transit quarantine, as well as having said rules in place, and border control is easier for an island.

Britain is so close to continental Europe that being an island is irrelevant. Also, it has a population of 66 million compared to NZ’s 5 on just as small an island.

1. New Zealand isn't "an island", there's two, one is slightly bigger and has less people.

2. Is your implication that the UK is so close to the mainland that the covid numbers are high due to people coming over in rafts? In that case the UK should have lower covid numbers because it has a much larger navy covering a the english channel, irish sea, and the north sea. Where as NZ has to cover the entire south pacific.

For #2, there are people crossing in boats https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-58100694 (and I don't think there's enough will to use the Navy to stop them).

1. Sure, it's a figure of speech. And the number is way greater than two, if we're going to be nitpicky.

2. My point is that there's way more people entering, leaving, and going from A to B for whatever reason. Not trying to judge people, just stating a fact here.

It is far easier to lock down an island chain of 5 million people than it is to lock down a city of 8.5 million people.

But China knows how to do it, and they have much more density than the USA. You just need to be very authoritarian; e.g. marching people under guard to quarantine hotels from airplanes.

Right, I will second this, our law enforcement shut down the Florida Keys at what we call he 18 mile stretch. No one that is not a resident was allowed in. for a good deal of time it worked and to be honest, I am thankful that they did, as at that moment in time, we did not know what we where looking at.

It’s also worked pretty well in China.

Where they forceably took citizens for quarantine?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/video-appears-show-people...

Yeah, that's not happening in the U.S. Not without starting a civil war.

"Later the policy became even more aggressive, with officials going door to door for health checks, and forcing anyone ill into isolation. A disabled boy reportedly died after he was left without food, water or help when his his father and brother were quarantined."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/chinas-coronav...

That's just the chinese administrative culture. It's obviously totally possible to do a strict lockdown without doing anything draconian.

I'd argue that a 'strict lockdown' is, in itself, rather draconian. Almost by definition, it requires heavy policing of an individual's life and almost total surveillance of their movements.

If by 'strict lockdown' you mean 'Ask people to limit their movements and preferably just stay at home' then maybe that's not quite so draconian.

Oh really? Is it possible to shut down the birthday parties and holiday gatherings my neighbors were having during the height of the winter peak without being draconian?

Incredibly well. But wonder how long they can keep doing it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-23/china-cru...

Being a remote island nation really doesn't make much difference in the era of Air travel. It has (had) very high immigration rates and a lot of tourists.

every single person traveling through an international airport is concentrated and processed in a way that people driving from alabama to florida are not. that makes an extraordinary difference.

Let's take an island nation with an island nation - the Isle of Mann.

58x less people than New Zealand. Only accessible by plane and boat.

37 deaths to NZs 26.

Also, a country with a GDP the size of the U.S. state of Oklahoma mind you (New Zealand's G.D.P 204,671, Oklahoma's G.D.P. 206,058 (in USD million, 2019, according to the IMF) [1]

[1] Comparison between U.S. states and sovereign states by GDP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states...

What does GDP measured in Oklahomas have to do with anything?

It gives you a general idea, how significant or insignificant an economy is and also roughly how many other moving parts of the global economy it has complex gears in.

And thereby how many more fold damages can result from a catastrophic shutdown of the country, something a small geographically-on-the-periphery-of-the-world nation need not worry about, to the same degree.

NZ isn't North Korea. It's not a hermit jurisdiction relying on its own internal economy. It relies a lot on trade with the rest of the world - it gets a lot of money from exports and relies a lot on imports (everything here is depressingly expensive for that reason).

Hell I'm even able to connect to communicate you using internet (the exact same kind you get in Oklahoma).

You got it all in reverse. Large countries are much less affected by this as they are more self sufficient. Small countries have far more open economies and depend far more on import and export to work. They are too small to make everything themselves.

Except that's completely wrong. All the costs are borne by the citizens of NZ. Someone who can't go to work in NZ is just as affected as someone who can't go to work in the US. The difference is, and was, in the government's response in assisting those bearing those costs.

Wait until they actually open up. They are just delaying the inevitable. Then again there’s no reason to go indoors in crowds in NZ—not like they have an arts scene, or anything, really, besides the outdoors.

Yes. For small island countries like New Zealand it works "great." This was never an option for countries like the US, or even most of Europe. Much less so for countries like India.

But we'll see how it goes. If New Zealand and Australia persist in this notion that they're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away, particularly with its endemicity now inevitable, I think you will soon find vast swaths of those countries in open, violent revolt.

I live in NZ and can assure you from the front lines of the revolt that we don't think we're going to stay locked down until the virus goes away.

The game has always been to play it by ear. That's been a great call so far, we've lived normal lives for the last year while incredible scientific advances have delivered vaccines.

This is a long game, and we've done well in the first quarter. I hope the politicians continue making good calls as the game goes on.

Don't assume that because we locked down hard that that will always be the path forward. That's your straw man talking.

While not disagreeing with that, I think we can continue to eliminate. During level-4, the R value is clearly lower than 1.0 meaning the infection shrinks. And the infection is small since we locked down immediately when a community case was first found. Six weeks will probably do it... so long as we don't have (a) new cases coming in through the border, or (b) infected people flaunting the lockdown rules and spreading it faster than we can contain it. Indeed, if it blows out past a couple thousand or so, we will need to pivot.

> During level-4, the R value is clearly lower than 1.0 meaning the infection shrinks

Delta is a different beast.

Here in Australia, Victoria managed to get the Reff rate down to ~0.75 during their OG outbreak last year with a strict lockdown. Delta has an R0 that is multiples higher than the OG strain so the same lockdown would not get it below 1. You can look at Victoria's current outbreak for evidence of this.

Now that doesn't mean NZ can't beat it. A part from Auckland, the population density is very low and as long as compliance is high you might be able to just about get it back down again; especially if you manage to keep it out of large households and essential workers.

I just wouldn't base my expectations on what worked last year as Delta is quite a different game.

>You can look at Victoria's current outbreak for evidence of this.

Also worth noting that peoples' behaviour is very different this time round compared to a year ago. A lot more people are flouting the rules or at least coming up with creative ways to see their friends while technically not breaking the law. After 200+ days, everybody's just sick of it.

The framing of New Zealand's approach as "working great" is also very highly opinionated. My NZ colleagues are all starting to get sick of this approach, and even the ones that fully support it are realizing that having no international travel and a couple of 6 week nationwide lockdowns every year is not a viable long-term solution.

If you look at how far NZ has gotten in regards to overcoming the virus, it's clearly very far behind most of the world. It's done a good job so far of reducing the harm caused directly by infection, but in many ways it's just tried to lock itself into a time bubble in early 2020. The world is starting to move on, and NZ has put itself in a rather bad position of having to try and catch up. The longer it sticks with this approach, the harder it's going to be.

I agree, elimination still looks a good strategy, it's too early to give it up yet. If we can punch out the current outbreak (I'd put money on it, but not too much) and get back to zero then that will re-legitimise lockdown as a strategy for a bit longer.

We've got a few "open 'er up and let it rip" friends and I just don't get it. There are so many potential game changers when you are an island. If a reliable saliva-based test appeared that produced results in say 2 hours we could reduce MIQ and use waiting booths at the airport. Even if it was only 99% accurate we could pool groups of 20 into rooms together while waiting for results. So many possibilities if we continue to think critically instead of politically.

A quick word on test attributes and why we still don't have a more rapid test than PCR.

Tests for disease rely on two numbers:

1. "sensitivity" - the proportion of people with COVID who get a positive test

2. "specificity" - the proportion of people without COVID who get a negative test.

COVID, despite the media attention, is a rare disease compared to the number of people tested. Say we have 10,000 people tested for COVID at the airport. We have 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity. And we know 100 people have COVID (1% prevalence) in this group. Our test would find 99/100 of the positive cases. But it would also find an additional 99 false positives! It also misses one true positive case. Which would be disasterous for the quarantine measures in place in Australia and NZ. In short, even a gold standard rapid test is not enough, although at 99% specificity and sensitivity it would be somewhat useful.

This is a lot less intuitive than it looks. The companies pushing rapid antigen tests at the start of the pandemic would have know better, but they chose to lie to the public about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

I wish you well.

What I feel is a real problem in the makes is that you eventually have to open up again but with not enough folks vaccinated.

And suddenly, you are in a situation many other countries have right now.

Our vaccination program is ramping up nicely, even with the lockdown they're posting record numbers. Should be done by the end of the year, and if we can get this outbreak under control we'll easily get there before the next one.

Definitely a concern for countries that have been able to lock down. Taiwan also had to rush to get people vaccinated when they had an outbreak recently.

You can't really look at the US and say "it doesn't work", because even the slightest restrictions were leveraged into a major political issue.

Agree. I don’t think anywhere in the US did anything that could reasonably be called a lockdown.

“Try to gather in groups of no more than six (at a time).” “When you need food, go to the grocery store (as often as you see fit).”

Is anyone surprised that a highly contagious virus was able to escape these “lockdown” measures?

> I don’t think anywhere in the US did anything that could reasonably be called a lockdown.

Agreed, yet people still clamor for more of the same ineffective nonsense while dousing their hands in sanitizer and erecting plexiglass barriers in front of everything. We do everything except what would make a difference: fixing indoor ventilation.

the problem is that even those halfhearted measures have proven to be economically disastrous for small to medium scale businesses and virtually everyone without a line to nearly limitless private equity. pairing the rollout of ineffective 'lockdowns' with woefully insufficient safety nets [that were even further stripped down and delayed by politicking] has effectively poisoned the public will towards any further interventions across large segments of the country. you would have been hard-pressed to even deliberately design a containment more guaranteed for failure.

You can't say it looking at the US, but I think it's hard to find fault with the strength of the initial lockdowns in France or Spain or Italy.

It worked pretty well for Thailand, a country with 3k of land borders that people can and do walk across. Delta seems to have changed the calculus though

It was an option for China. They allowed international travel but disallowed inter province travel.

Edit: Don’t mean to sound nasty, but this type of reasoning gets repeated so often without much criticism.

It worked for China too, so don’t come with this “small countries” crap. The US is “small” relative to China. Okay… now we get the “easy in a dictatorship” response to which I offer Japan. A democracy, with relatively large and dense population, yet have had relative few cases… although I am sure an excuse can be invented for them too…

Japan is having lots of problems with COVID. They are like Sweden in this regard.

Hmmmm. Japan, I wonder what’s happening there right now.

nothing

We're on a 4th wave, that's currently completely out of control. The hospitals are overwhelmed, and most Covid patients aren't being accepted by the hospitals.

Not sure why you'd say nothing.

One guy punching a horse and Queensland putting a hundred or so bored soldiers on the border to check permits of cars that drive past is not a state of open violent revolt.

>Not 26 per 100k population

I know people like to think that doing the per-capita calculation puts every country on an even footing for comparison. But it's kind of silly to straight compare countries with vastly different geographies and economies, regardless of population normalization.

>I think there's a fair chance they'll beat it again

If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything.

> If they are locked down, again, 16 months into this thing, they never beat anything.

They eliminated this virus across Aotearoa. We didn't eliminate it everywhere else (actually almost anywhere else) and infected people continued to arrive at their border, eventually one of those infections (from Australia) leaked into their community about two weeks ago.

Unless your point is some purely nihilist position like "In the end nothing matters" (then why are you posting?) they beat this and now they're going to have to do it again.

But.. they didn't beat it. It's not endemic, it's not "one of the common colds", it's a locked down island, where noone can enter or exit freely anymore. This is like hiding in a cave, and saying that you've beat the bear outside.

I understand the advantages to a global village but we rarely talk about the downsides. Perhaps the global village is a failed experiment and needs to be reconfigured into bubbles. Perhaps we need to move back to a protectism of sort.

But why? People prefer the freedom to a minor risk. When lockdowns stop, people don't stay in their home bubble, but go out and meet with people. Why? Because they weren't at home because they were afraid of the corona, but because they were forced by their governments. Looking at the current happenings in europe, sooner or later a critical mass will be reached somewhere, and some (political) heads will fall.

In general yes, closing people up inside, in separate rooms, giving them only the needed amount of calories, forbidding every even mildly dangerous sport, and of course driving and cycling, would save many lives. But who wants to live in a world like that?

Not being able to leave your house, and not being able to leave your country, aren’t the same. The difference in degree is big enough to count as a difference in kind.

Please don’t blame Australia for NSW’s mistake. The rest of us are facing a similar problem due to their state governments incompetence.

> they beat this and now they're going to have to do it again.

It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it a dozen times.

The point is that you can't just draw a line around obvious failure modes and say they're not part of the strategy. If you compare the median global response to "we beat the virus with a single lockdown!", that sounds like an obvious winner, but it's a much more equivocal story if you compare it to "we'll be doing snap lockdowns 1-2 times a year for the foreseeable future, and even then we may need to give up on elimination if one of the lockdowns doesn't work".

(As someone mentioned upthread, this shouldn't be seen as a slight against the people or leadership of New Zealand, who generally seem to understand that lockdowns weren't meant to be a one-and-done measure.)

Uh. The US is suffering another 9/11 every few days. In huge parts of the country, life is nowhere near normal.

That's what they beat, and God willing will beat again.

> The US is suffering another 9/11 every few days.

Except no, it is not 9/11. People with a year or two of life expectancy dying is not the same as what happened with 9/11 & not the same as Vietnam. Millions of people die every year in the US, it's what happens to the old, the sick and eventually to us all.

Please stop saying that 1 or 2 years life expectancy does not matter. It matter a LOT for their families and for them it is almost the same as loosing someone with 20 years life expectancy.

I wish this narrative will go away.

They are a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere with a population of a larger city - how is their situation applicable to any major nation in the world ?

Uhuh. Hawaii, an entire US state that is "a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere" and yet somehow didn't eliminate the virus has far fewer people than New Zealand.

Hawaii has the lowest coronavirus death rate per capita of any US state and is lower than the US average by nearly a factor of five.

Yet it's still almost 100x the death rate of NZ, per capita.

Hawaii is still allowing tourism from the USA, I assume NZ is not allowing similar tourism. They could have locked down harder (being an island and all) but didn't probably because their economy isn't as independent as NZ's is.

Cases have been skyrocketing in Hawaii over the last month, though, especially on the outlying islands. Before July, the highest daily case count the Big Island had ever had was ~30. Now the 7-day average is 125, or 60/100k.

Given the health care resources available anywhere but in Honolulu, things won't be pretty if it keeps climbing.

Hawaii is a state, not a sovereign country - locking down domestic interstate travel and trade is much harder than locking don international travel.

Western Australia is also a state and we've regularly locked down all travel from other Australian states when they have community outbreaks. We have a COVID death rate lower than New Zealand and, like NZ, have lived essentially normally throughout COVID despite the travel restrictions.

Currently you can only come here from NSW with express permission and then you have to quarantine at your own expense for 2 weeks. Quarantine requirements kick-in whenever there's a community outbreak in other states/territories and the restrictions ramp up as case numbers grow.

It is easy for Western Australia and Tasmania to isolate because the former has a vast desert between here and the east coast and the latter is an island without an international airport (probably one of the safer spots on Earth). There's no physical reason Hawaii and Alaska couldn't have done the same, but it's probably not politically or socially acceptable.

Atlantic Canada locked travel from out of region down almost completely ... as a result Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland have had the lowest rates (per capita) of COVID in North America:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/covid-19-in-the-u-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Bubble

Did they lockdown travel into the state like NZ did?

No. There have been plenty of people traveling in and out of Hawaii all along. There were some quarantine/testing requirements at various times. But certainly not closed borders. I even looked of going there at one point but, when I looked, hotels were quite expensive.

And it seem a as soon as they start to open up, they get new infections. How many hard lockdowns will they have to have?

Our last level four lockdown was in April of 2020 - where are you getting your information?

How many tourists did you get this year? How many local tourists went to other countries and came back?

New Zealand is an island.. elimination strategy would not work in many other locations

I look at New Zealand and see close to the opposite. A near-complete failure. They've isolated themselves from the world for nearly 2 years, and have approximately zero things to show for it. They're not significantly vaccinated (25%, what happened??) and have no plan to be able to re-open up anytime soon.

It sounds harsh, but I don't see that they've done a lot other than waste 2 years of their life sitting on their hands.

My household has had zero cases per capita. Population count and relative isolation make a huge difference.

You can't directly compare NZ with places like Germany or the US.

It's not just that... NZ is an island, with few people going in and out daily. In europe, you have people living in one country and working in another, and driving across the border daily. You have trucks driving through 10 different countries, with drivers stopping, filling up the gas, eating and sleeping in many of them. You have large cities, where the border goes across the urban areas, and your nearest store is in another country.

When we talk about population count, maybe China is a country worth mentioning here?

The success in New Zealand seems like the elephant in the room, that the Atlantic article failed to refer to. Not to mention China.

Does anyone really believe the reported stats for China?

I'm not saying that Wuhan's number is 100% accurate, feel free to inflate it by 10 times. But even with the censored social media in China, words do get across, and there's no evidence of any big outbreaks like in Wuhan or New York after April last year.

Virus cannot teleport from person to person, so why wouldn't NPIs like real lockdowns with full food delivery and mass testing (unlike mockdowns in some other countries) work?

If you don't believe the numbers, ask anyone you know who has relatives in China.

Lockdowns, or mass hospitalizations/deaths from Covid are a bit difficult to hide from the people living through it, if either of those two things are happening, everyone would hear about it through the grapevine.

I did exactly that (wife’s family lives in Beijing).

Various parts of Beijing and Nanjing have been under relative “lockdown” at various points in time in the last year. I’m pretty sure this has been reported in Western media too (and I’m sure that other parts of the country have too). I have no idea where this idea that “China has zero COVID lockdowns” came from. I suppose it may depend on your definition of lockdown.

I don't doubt that lockdowns are happening, which is why I listed the presence or absence of them as one of the two obvious things that can be observed by people living there.

I do have doubts that their actual case numbers are too far off from reported case numbers. (Because mass sickness and death, just like lockdowns, would also be obvious to observe.)

NZ has no cities. Auckland, the country's largest town, consists of 4 or 5 blocks of high density "city". Wellington another 2 or 3 blocks of high density "city". Outside of those few blocks the entire country is low-rise detached apartments, quickly giving way to semi-detached housing, which quickly gives way to endless suburbia. NZ has zero density.

A lot of paranormal activity for Wellington given that density

Of course you can. They just did compare them.

>New Zealand had 26 deaths in over a year of the pandemic. Not 26 per 100k population. Not 26 per day. Twenty six people full stop. Because in fact "We go hard and we go early" works.

We could tackle smoking and obesity similarly to similar effect.

New Zealand is not really a replicable model. It has a lot of unique properties like the combination of wealth, remoteness, culture, population density, etc. Not a lot that other countries can learn from it. Other countries could learn more from countries like Vietnam.

If you want to learn how to get a basketball in the hoop reliably, you’re better off asking a regular guy than a 7 footer who will say “well just put it in.”

As others have pointed out they're able to totally control their border and quarantine every single arrival.

But more importantly, how will it end for them? Australia and New Zealand are among the worst corona zealot nations. New Zealand just shut down everything over a single case and the PM told people to not even talk to each other anymore. How will they get out of this? If they looked at the facts they'd understand they will have to open up eventually, might as well do it now. Instead they're now trapped in eternal 'zero covid'.

Your comment is slightly out of date. The stated position of both the Australian PM and NSW state premier is that elimination is impossible, and vaccination/reopening is the goal.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-update-we-cant...

If that's correct then why have they been so slow to distribute vaccines?

I recognise you may not have the backstory on why this is the case.

Australia relied mainly on AstraZeneca and the UQ molecular clamping vaccine for its vaccine strategy, both of which could be manufactured locally. It signed other contracts for vaccines lackadaisically and with a late delivery time.

AstraZeneca is less effective than mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna, and causes a rare blood clotting condition that's fatal at a rate of 1 per millions. The UQ molecular clamping vaccine failed clinical trials despite being effective because it caused some patients to return a false positive result for HIV. This meant that domestic vaccine production in Australia was limited to one less effective vaccine that sometimes (very rarely) kills the people who get it, which the media have had a field day with.

The government now faces the problem of having millions of doses of a vaccine that few people want, few doses of the vaccines everyone wants, drug manufacturers who've already signed agreements with everyone else, a low rate of infection (due to lockdowns) that means they don't deserve emergency support, and a population that has no idea what's happening because the situation is complicated.

On top of this, the government has made some bad decisions with the roll-out itself. It doesn't allow the age groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 to receive the marginally safer and significantly more effective mRNA vaccines, on the basis that this age group has a clear benefit from receiving AstraZeneca and a lower risk of blood clotting, so there's significant vaccine hesitancy and less effective vaccine coverage among the very group who's most likely to die from the disease. It also didn't allow young people to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine for a long time, and even now requires them to give informed consent to a doctor or pharmacist before receiving it, so the roll-out requires finding qualified doctors and pharmacists as well as nurses, at a time when the medical system is already strained.

Can't you buy other vaccines?

I live in slovenia, and we're giving vaccines away to other countries (literally), because people don't want to get vaccinated, and the vaccines are nearing the expiry date.

You can choose the vaccine, and can get vaccinated any day, even without signing up.

Yes, that's the obvious solution, and in fact we've bought Pfizer from Poland and cut various other deals. It's unfortunately not quick to do, although in my opinion the government failed to prioritise it as heavily as it should have.

Interesting to see that vaccine idiocy has made it to other countries. American soft power truly is something.

Interesting you think it’s American soft power when it might as well be Russian soft power that is making it to the U.S. south.

That’s the story of how it started.

Australia is a rich country, once this happened they could have paid whatever it takes to get enough Pfeizer/Moderna. The price almost don’t matter, it is so cost effective it’s insane.

If we could figure out the total cost of this pandemic I’m sure all the vaccines we will take over many years will be a fraction of 1% of the total cost and that is not including human suffering and death.

Yep. It costs somewhere on the order of $100 million to $1 billion a week to keep Sydney or Melbourne in lockdown. The costs thus far have vastly exceeded the estimated cost of ordering mRNA vaccine doses for every adult in the country ($780m[0]) or building federal quarantine facilities that don't leak cases (around $200m for a 500 bed facility[1]). It's an astounding leadership failure.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/10/stuffed-how-au...

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/deal-in-sight-for-20..., and though I have doubts about whether it should cost $400k a bed to build and operate a quarantine facility, it would still be much cheaper than locking down the entire state

For elderly patients at least the risk of HIV infection is minimal so I don't understand why a false positive HIV test would cause a clinical trial to fail. Some cancer therapies also cause false positive HIV tests and that doesn't prevent them being used.

Because the federal government is full of incompetent conservative fuckwits that couldn't organise a root in a brothel and would struggle to win 5% of the vote without decades of the worst Murdoch propaganda behind them that makes Fox News look reasonable.

We have one of the worst governments in the entire democratic world. We just got insanely lucky that at the start of the pandemic they decided to lay off as much responsibility as possible to the state governments who have mostly been fantastic.

This got downvoted for the emotional language, but the facts of the matter are sadly correct.

Incompetent governance.

So their initial strategy turned out impossible to follow, but now they have a new one you trust?

Did they refund the fines of those people who protested or are people still fined and arrested?

you misunderstand the zero covid strategy. The endgame is not zero covid forever. The endgame is zero-covid until we get as many people vaccinated as possible. This is the best result that can be achieved. less deaths, AND less economic disruption.

"They might as well do it now" is misguided. Would you prefer to release a virus into an unvaccinated or fully vaccinated population?

At this point, in the US any adult who wants to be vaccinated, is. But we still have to mask up due to Delta getting past the vaccines, and children not being vaccinated.

in Aus we don't have enough vaccines to give to the people that want them. bad luck on vaccine betting and incompetent government are the main reasons.

Why are they not vaccinated yet? Everyone here in Western Europe has had access by now if they wanted to get vaccinated. Could it be their "strategy" changes every week and isn't a strategy at all?

Bad luck on vaccine betting and incompetent government are the main reasons. Others have elaborated in this thread.

Got a source on the NZ PM saying they can't talk to one another anymore?

"Don't talk to your neighbours." https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-children-...

To expand upon your quote:

> "We ask people to stay two metres away from anyone you pass," she said. "Stay local. Do not congregate. Don't talk to your neighbours. Please, keep to your bubble."

To interpret that as anything other than physical distancing measures can only be deliberate obtuseness. You can talk to anyone you want, just pick up the phone.

> New Zealand just shut down everything over a single case

It's maddening to see someone peddling this narrative in a discussion on HN.

No, that's a literal description of what they did last week:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/new-zealand-to...

One (1) positive case, entire nation placed on maximum level 4 lockdown where you can't leave your house except for a very short list of permitted reasons.

NZ now has more than 100 cases. I wonder how high it would be now if they didn't.

It's not a literal description of what happened.

Read the article you linked to, not just the headline. It explains the additional factors that informed the decision.

The "1 positive case" narrative is nonsense.

I'm quite well aware of what's happening in NZ, thank you, and the reason they locked down the whole nation is because that one case a) could not be immediately linked to another case, implying there were likely others out there, and b) had moved around quite a bit, meaning other cases were likely widely spread. As we now know both these turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, it is still a literally true statement that the entirety of NZ was locked down over one (1) case, because if they hadn't found that one case, they wouldn't have done that.