4 ms·

Not really. There are two basically insurmountable problems with taking New Zealand's success and expanding it to the entire globe. Firstly, the effectiveness o

by makomk 6y ago

Not really. There are two basically insurmountable problems with taking New Zealand's success and expanding it to the entire globe. Firstly, the effectiveness of this is limited by wherever it works the least well. Secondly, even if everywhere could implement the same measures as New Zealand as well as they did, over that large a scale there would be places which had much worse success just through random chance alone. You can see a few places where New Zealand got lucky already, like the recent outbreak of unknown origin not spreading as widely as it might've or the infections amongst border workers back when they weren't being widely tested. You can also see this in Australia, which is similar geographically but bigger and has taken many similar measures with slightly worse results. Scale up three orders of magnitude, and I've no doubt fun new failure modes will appear which aren't even visible yet.

statstutor 6y ago
> You can see a few places where New Zealand got lucky already This is a case of "you make your own luck". The UK has presumably been lucky more often, but we have never had the opportunity to observe it.
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
China is the most populous country on Earth, and geographically, one of the largest. It has followed a similar strategy as New Zealand and Australia. That strategy has worked to keep the country essentially CoVID-19-free over the past year.
- ateesdalejr 6y ago
  That's what you've been told by Chinese authorities; whom we have no reason to trust due to previous events.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. I'm sure there are many on HN who live in China - they can also tell you what things are like there. If there were a major ongoing epidemic in China, it would be impossible to hide. Hospitals would be under the same sort of pressure that they are in Europe and the US. People would have family members and friends who got sick or who died. That's not happening. China is simply too tightly connected to the rest of the world to keep things like this a secret. In December 2019, the existence of the outbreak in Wuhan was known around the world within days of the first patient test results coming back. Even Western media began grudgingly admitting several months ago the virus was essentially gone from China. For example, German/French public radio did a pretty interesting documentary on post-CoVID-19 Wuhan. The first scene is in a packed discotheque: * German: https://youtu.be/LmsI7lc2_Vg https://youtu.be/LmsI7lc2_Vg * French: https://youtu.be/OyHt7-KmK7Y https://youtu.be/OyHt7-KmK7Y * English subtitles: https://youtu.be/DEOyhN2-kPs https://youtu.be/DEOyhN2-kPs
    - loveistheanswer 6y ago
      >It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. Yep, that's how censorship works. I'm sure you won't see too many people talking about Tiananmen Square on Chinese social media either, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Are we really going to pretend that the Chinese government hasn't been heavily censoring information which makes them look bad? Early on in the pandemic, the Chinese covid death counts started to skyrocket, and activists within the country were using Github to make sure this information did not get 404'd. The same day these activists were dissapeared, the skyrocketing "official" chinese covid death count immediately went down to "0", where it has remained ever since. When using Google to browse the death counts by country, you can't even look at the death counts for China, the button is disabled. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-activists-citizen-journalists https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-acti...
      - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
        > Yep, that's how censorship works. China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, or the millions of live conversations going on at any given moment between people inside China and people outside. This view of China, that it's a black box that information can't escape out of, is simply not reality.
        loveistheanswer 6y ago
        >China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, Yes, they do, directly and indirectly. Directly: Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese virologist who blew the whistle on covid in December 2019, but the Chinese government covered that up. She defected to the US, and published a research paper critical of the Chinese government, and Twitter banned her account. Indirectly: How likely do you think it would be for the chinese government to renew an expats visa if they were doing activist work like the chinese activists who got dissapeared for reporting covid deaths on Github? They didn't even let a WHO investigation team into their country for almost a year
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    So you only trust the reports of bad things?

by makomk 6y ago

statstutor 6y ago

> You can see a few places where New Zealand got lucky already This is a case of "you make your own luck". The UK has presumably been lucky more often, but we have never had the opportunity to observe it.

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

China is the most populous country on Earth, and geographically, one of the largest. It has followed a similar strategy as New Zealand and Australia. That strategy has worked to keep the country essentially CoVID-19-free over the past year.

ateesdalejr 6y ago
That's what you've been told by Chinese authorities; whom we have no reason to trust due to previous events.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. I'm sure there are many on HN who live in China - they can also tell you what things are like there. If there were a major ongoing epidemic in China, it would be impossible to hide. Hospitals would be under the same sort of pressure that they are in Europe and the US. People would have family members and friends who got sick or who died. That's not happening. China is simply too tightly connected to the rest of the world to keep things like this a secret. In December 2019, the existence of the outbreak in Wuhan was known around the world within days of the first patient test results coming back. Even Western media began grudgingly admitting several months ago the virus was essentially gone from China. For example, German/French public radio did a pretty interesting documentary on post-CoVID-19 Wuhan. The first scene is in a packed discotheque: * German: https://youtu.be/LmsI7lc2_Vg https://youtu.be/LmsI7lc2_Vg * French: https://youtu.be/OyHt7-KmK7Y https://youtu.be/OyHt7-KmK7Y * English subtitles: https://youtu.be/DEOyhN2-kPs https://youtu.be/DEOyhN2-kPs
  - loveistheanswer 6y ago
    >It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. Yep, that's how censorship works. I'm sure you won't see too many people talking about Tiananmen Square on Chinese social media either, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Are we really going to pretend that the Chinese government hasn't been heavily censoring information which makes them look bad? Early on in the pandemic, the Chinese covid death counts started to skyrocket, and activists within the country were using Github to make sure this information did not get 404'd. The same day these activists were dissapeared, the skyrocketing "official" chinese covid death count immediately went down to "0", where it has remained ever since. When using Google to browse the death counts by country, you can't even look at the death counts for China, the button is disabled. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-activists-citizen-journalists https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-acti...
    - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
      > Yep, that's how censorship works. China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, or the millions of live conversations going on at any given moment between people inside China and people outside. This view of China, that it's a black box that information can't escape out of, is simply not reality.
      - loveistheanswer 6y ago
        >China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, Yes, they do, directly and indirectly. Directly: Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese virologist who blew the whistle on covid in December 2019, but the Chinese government covered that up. She defected to the US, and published a research paper critical of the Chinese government, and Twitter banned her account. Indirectly: How likely do you think it would be for the chinese government to renew an expats visa if they were doing activist work like the chinese activists who got dissapeared for reporting covid deaths on Github? They didn't even let a WHO investigation team into their country for almost a year
- tshaddox 6y ago
  So you only trust the reports of bad things?