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Did Ireland employ the same strategy as NZ? My claim isn't that being a small island nation is a sufficient condition.

• pessimizer 6y ago
  Did a larger, non-island country without totalitarian control over their population unsuccessfully employ the same strategy as NZ? You can't have this both ways.
  • hnracer 6y ago
    Yes. Australia copied NZ almost move for move (travel nearly completely banned - small handful of daily flights with quarantine, harsh lockdowns), and failed, primarily because Australia is too big. They were able to eliminate covid in states of equivalent size as NZ, in effect achieving something just as impressive. But because the country is bigger, all it takes is a cluster in a single state to then propagate to others. Australia is a pretty small country. In a country as big as the US it would be virtually impossible to eliminate without extreme levels of control over the population.
    • tialaramex 6y ago
      This is wrong, Australia did not have New Zealand's elimination strategy. It followed the same sort of strategy as most of Western Europe. Control the worst spike with a lockdown, and then relax once the worst is over. One of the giveaways was in their briefings at the time. New Zealand was interested in every new case, because you don't get to elimination with some sort of high level statistical approach, you get there one case at a time. Australia was happy to cheer success if it had fewer cases this week than last week - but fewer isn't elimination. New Zealand left Level 2 only after weeks with zero new cases. Because they understood that "it's just one case" plus "infectious disease" multiplied by time = unlimited cases. Meanwhile Australians decided they were done, after all it's only a few cases, what's the harm? Well this is the harm.