5 ms·

I live in New Zealand, where our first lockdown was taken VERY seriously by nearly everyone. If the population actually does it, lockdown works. A lot of people

by mdoms 6y ago

I live in New Zealand, where our first lockdown was taken VERY seriously by nearly everyone. If the population actually does it, lockdown works. A lot of people credited our current administration for our successful Covid elimination, but I think it comes down to our culture. We work together in close communities.

BurningFrog 6y ago
Maybe you're sick or hearing this argument, but I'm sure being the most isolated country on Earth helps in a pandemic. Not that I doubt the civic mindedness of the NZ people!
- tempestn 6y ago
  I think both isolation and the strict initial lockdown were necessary conditions. Here in BC, Canada, we had a strict initial lockdown that also drove cases to essentially zero. However, even when community spread was wiped out in the summer of 2020, we would have a few cases imported each day, mostly from the US. The border was closed to non-essential traffic, but the economies of the US and Canada are so closely linked that even just essential traffic is many thousands of people each day. Therefore a policy of driving cases to zero and keeping them there just wasn't feasible here, because you'd have to maintain a strict lockdown indefinitely.
  - amscanne 6y ago
    > However, even when community spread was wiped out in the summer of 2020, we would have a few cases imported each day, mostly from the US Is this really the belief? Canada’s inferiority complex wrt to the US has made their perception of COVID out of touch with reality. There was always significant community transmission in BC, even in the summer. Cases never went to zero, the lowest point was ~10/day. And it’s likely underestimating by a factor of >5 since testing in Canada was not done well. (This is despite the popular perception. Anecdotally, in Washington my family was able to roll into drive thru testing sites and get next day results for free, and in Canada it was a >$100 appt at the retail pharmacy and 3-5 days for results. I don’t how it is now, but Washington has been doing ~3x as much testing per capita as BC since early summer last year.) So even if essential travelers crossing the border was importing a few cases a day (extremely unlikely IMO, and zero evidence supporting this), it would be accounting for a small single digit percentage of cases.
    - tempestn 6y ago
      BC has not been doing the quantity of testing that WA has, but it had been contact tracing all cases, and in the summer when cases were in the single to low double digits per day, the majority of cases were traced to travel, from the US and from elsewhere in Canada. For a number of weeks there was not significant community spread. You don't need to test the whole population to know that; if case that are found can be contact traced to a travel event, that is sufficient to demonstrate lack of significant community transmission. Of course many of these imported cases did transmit the virus to others locally, but the point was that the sequence of transmission could be traced back to a specific border crossing. As opposed to community spread, where the original source of introduction is unknown. This is based on evidence presented at the time in briefings from the BC public health officer. Do you have any basis for the claim that only a "small single digit percentage of cases" were imported from the US during the summer? Certainly community spread has worsened significantly since then, but that's kind of my point; it was never realistic to essentially eradicate the virus and then open back up here, as NZ did, because there would always be a baseline number of imported cases ready to spark a new outbreak.
      - amscanne 6y ago
        I think my point was not well constructed. NZ locked down, had good isolation, and got a bit lucky. The problem with COVID is that because there’s a large portion asymptomatic carriers, the success of contact tracing can vary a lot. In Canada, it is politically expedient to point to (valid) US failings and throw them under the bus. I don’t doubt that this is something done by the BC health officer at the time. My math of single digit percentage is based on even having a few cases a day coming in contrasted with 10-20 cases underrepresented by a factor of ~5. It’s just guessing, but I doubt they have more than a few direct travel cases each day and therefore community transmission was significant. I would be curious if there was any data that suggests this guesstimate is wrong. It’s possible to argue that all that community transmission was the result of border crossings, but the same is true everywhere and quickly becomes non-sensical. Would the virus have disappeared if not reseeded by travel cases? We do know that New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had the same essential travelers (i.e. baseline imports) but were able to effectively control and have had no deaths since August of last year (and very few cases). I’m not saying that BC did a poor job — I’m not sure that BC could have done anything to contain the virus completely. But I also don’t think it’s reasonable to point the finger completely at travelers as the thing that prevented success.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  OK, now do Australia, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea. Being isolated is an advantage, but the key to success appears to be sealing the border early and having an enforced quarantine period upon entering the country. Essentially all countries that successfully controlled COVID did this. The purpose of this is to keep cases to a very low number, which allows test/trace/isolate to not be overwhelmed. If there are a lot of tracers and they don't have much work to do, they can be very thorough and you get few leaks. When you do get leaks, targeted lockdowns work to suppress clusters while test/trace swarms in. Lockdowns, quarantines, and mask mandates that are not actually enforced are much less useful than ones with teeth. There will always be a segment of the population that doesn't want to cooperate, and if they are not forced to comply, clusters will form among these populations, overwhelm test/trace, and then spread to the general population.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    > Australia, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea. Those are all quite isolated countries without active land borders, except probably Vietnam. And maybe that was your point.
    - cameldrv 6y ago
      China is isolated without active land borders? Show me the country that made a serious attempt at border closure and had early enforced and supervised quarantine that has had a huge outbreak on the scale of U.S./Europe.
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        I meant more that China had the Police Stata capability to close down it's internal borders, regardless of anyone's opinion, which is how they got things under control. But that's not what I wrote, so I take responsibility for being misunderstood :)
        cameldrv 6y ago
sokoloff 6y ago
What was the grocery and other essentials shopping situation in the NZ lockdowns?
- mdoms 6y ago
  Grocery stores stayed open but with limited capacity. Pharmacies stayed open, but small independent groceries and specialty food stores closed. People were asked to queue 2m apart and wait your turn. We didn't bitch and moan about it, we just did it. 4 weeks of hard lockdown then 2 more weeks of slightly lifted restrictions, and in exchange we got a full summer of nearly completely free movement with cases being counted on one hand per day.
- anotherevan 6y ago
  Can't speak to conditions in the NZ lockdowns, but during the strictest period of the Melbourne, Australia lockdowns there were only four reasons to leave your home/property: essential shopping (one person, once a day), exercise (one hour a day), care (your own or loved one), work (for essential services). Groceries, as well as chemists and other specific industries were considered essential services that remained open. Lots of health and safety requirements put in place, including wearing masks, perspex screens between you and the cashier (or dividers at self-checkouts) to reduce droplet transmission. 1.5 meter minimum distance between people not from the same household. One person per four square meter density rules for indoor workplaces. The list goes on. Movement was also limited to five kilometers from your home without a good reason (common sense exceptions in cases where your closest grocer was further away for instance, but not so you could travel to the other side of the city to go for a nice bush walk) and you had to wear a mask whenever not in your own home. Elimination of community transmission was achieved during our (admittedly mild) winter. Not during our (admittedly mild) summer as a lot of people in other hemispheres seemed to assume. While our geography was advantageous, it also required a huge effort of societal and political will and cooperation to achieve. It relied on following the advice of our health experts and scientists in the face of large economic and political pressures. In Melbourne now we are enjoying reasonably normal conditions compared to B.C. (Before COVID) times. There's fairly little risk of community transmission. Most people are back at work and/or some combination of continued work from home. Schools are open. You still have to be carrying a mask when not at home, but only required to wear it in shopping centres and similar situations where there are large numbers of people indoors and similar. Plenty of hand sanitiser dispensers around. Aforementioned screens and dividers are still around. We had a snap five day "circuit breaker" lockdown recently after a cluster of infections occurred (escaped from quarantine) which was successful but unsettling, particularly for those who had a harder time of it last year. Not sure why I ended up doing such a details write up to your inquiry. I suspect it was cathartic.

by mdoms 6y ago

BurningFrog 6y ago

Maybe you're sick or hearing this argument, but I'm sure being the most isolated country on Earth helps in a pandemic. Not that I doubt the civic mindedness of the NZ people!

tempestn 6y ago
I think both isolation and the strict initial lockdown were necessary conditions. Here in BC, Canada, we had a strict initial lockdown that also drove cases to essentially zero. However, even when community spread was wiped out in the summer of 2020, we would have a few cases imported each day, mostly from the US. The border was closed to non-essential traffic, but the economies of the US and Canada are so closely linked that even just essential traffic is many thousands of people each day. Therefore a policy of driving cases to zero and keeping them there just wasn't feasible here, because you'd have to maintain a strict lockdown indefinitely.
- amscanne 6y ago
  > However, even when community spread was wiped out in the summer of 2020, we would have a few cases imported each day, mostly from the US Is this really the belief? Canada’s inferiority complex wrt to the US has made their perception of COVID out of touch with reality. There was always significant community transmission in BC, even in the summer. Cases never went to zero, the lowest point was ~10/day. And it’s likely underestimating by a factor of >5 since testing in Canada was not done well. (This is despite the popular perception. Anecdotally, in Washington my family was able to roll into drive thru testing sites and get next day results for free, and in Canada it was a >$100 appt at the retail pharmacy and 3-5 days for results. I don’t how it is now, but Washington has been doing ~3x as much testing per capita as BC since early summer last year.) So even if essential travelers crossing the border was importing a few cases a day (extremely unlikely IMO, and zero evidence supporting this), it would be accounting for a small single digit percentage of cases.
  - tempestn 6y ago
    BC has not been doing the quantity of testing that WA has, but it had been contact tracing all cases, and in the summer when cases were in the single to low double digits per day, the majority of cases were traced to travel, from the US and from elsewhere in Canada. For a number of weeks there was not significant community spread. You don't need to test the whole population to know that; if case that are found can be contact traced to a travel event, that is sufficient to demonstrate lack of significant community transmission. Of course many of these imported cases did transmit the virus to others locally, but the point was that the sequence of transmission could be traced back to a specific border crossing. As opposed to community spread, where the original source of introduction is unknown. This is based on evidence presented at the time in briefings from the BC public health officer. Do you have any basis for the claim that only a "small single digit percentage of cases" were imported from the US during the summer? Certainly community spread has worsened significantly since then, but that's kind of my point; it was never realistic to essentially eradicate the virus and then open back up here, as NZ did, because there would always be a baseline number of imported cases ready to spark a new outbreak.
    - amscanne 6y ago
      I think my point was not well constructed. NZ locked down, had good isolation, and got a bit lucky. The problem with COVID is that because there’s a large portion asymptomatic carriers, the success of contact tracing can vary a lot. In Canada, it is politically expedient to point to (valid) US failings and throw them under the bus. I don’t doubt that this is something done by the BC health officer at the time. My math of single digit percentage is based on even having a few cases a day coming in contrasted with 10-20 cases underrepresented by a factor of ~5. It’s just guessing, but I doubt they have more than a few direct travel cases each day and therefore community transmission was significant. I would be curious if there was any data that suggests this guesstimate is wrong. It’s possible to argue that all that community transmission was the result of border crossings, but the same is true everywhere and quickly becomes non-sensical. Would the virus have disappeared if not reseeded by travel cases? We do know that New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had the same essential travelers (i.e. baseline imports) but were able to effectively control and have had no deaths since August of last year (and very few cases). I’m not saying that BC did a poor job — I’m not sure that BC could have done anything to contain the virus completely. But I also don’t think it’s reasonable to point the finger completely at travelers as the thing that prevented success.
cameldrv 6y ago
OK, now do Australia, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea. Being isolated is an advantage, but the key to success appears to be sealing the border early and having an enforced quarantine period upon entering the country. Essentially all countries that successfully controlled COVID did this. The purpose of this is to keep cases to a very low number, which allows test/trace/isolate to not be overwhelmed. If there are a lot of tracers and they don't have much work to do, they can be very thorough and you get few leaks. When you do get leaks, targeted lockdowns work to suppress clusters while test/trace swarms in. Lockdowns, quarantines, and mask mandates that are not actually enforced are much less useful than ones with teeth. There will always be a segment of the population that doesn't want to cooperate, and if they are not forced to comply, clusters will form among these populations, overwhelm test/trace, and then spread to the general population.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > Australia, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea. Those are all quite isolated countries without active land borders, except probably Vietnam. And maybe that was your point.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    China is isolated without active land borders? Show me the country that made a serious attempt at border closure and had early enforced and supervised quarantine that has had a huge outbreak on the scale of U.S./Europe.
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      I meant more that China had the Police Stata capability to close down it's internal borders, regardless of anyone's opinion, which is how they got things under control. But that's not what I wrote, so I take responsibility for being misunderstood :)
      - cameldrv 6y ago

sokoloff 6y ago

What was the grocery and other essentials shopping situation in the NZ lockdowns?

mdoms 6y ago
Grocery stores stayed open but with limited capacity. Pharmacies stayed open, but small independent groceries and specialty food stores closed. People were asked to queue 2m apart and wait your turn. We didn't bitch and moan about it, we just did it. 4 weeks of hard lockdown then 2 more weeks of slightly lifted restrictions, and in exchange we got a full summer of nearly completely free movement with cases being counted on one hand per day.
anotherevan 6y ago
Can't speak to conditions in the NZ lockdowns, but during the strictest period of the Melbourne, Australia lockdowns there were only four reasons to leave your home/property: essential shopping (one person, once a day), exercise (one hour a day), care (your own or loved one), work (for essential services). Groceries, as well as chemists and other specific industries were considered essential services that remained open. Lots of health and safety requirements put in place, including wearing masks, perspex screens between you and the cashier (or dividers at self-checkouts) to reduce droplet transmission. 1.5 meter minimum distance between people not from the same household. One person per four square meter density rules for indoor workplaces. The list goes on. Movement was also limited to five kilometers from your home without a good reason (common sense exceptions in cases where your closest grocer was further away for instance, but not so you could travel to the other side of the city to go for a nice bush walk) and you had to wear a mask whenever not in your own home. Elimination of community transmission was achieved during our (admittedly mild) winter. Not during our (admittedly mild) summer as a lot of people in other hemispheres seemed to assume. While our geography was advantageous, it also required a huge effort of societal and political will and cooperation to achieve. It relied on following the advice of our health experts and scientists in the face of large economic and political pressures. In Melbourne now we are enjoying reasonably normal conditions compared to B.C. (Before COVID) times. There's fairly little risk of community transmission. Most people are back at work and/or some combination of continued work from home. Schools are open. You still have to be carrying a mask when not at home, but only required to wear it in shopping centres and similar situations where there are large numbers of people indoors and similar. Plenty of hand sanitiser dispensers around. Aforementioned screens and dividers are still around. We had a snap five day "circuit breaker" lockdown recently after a cluster of infections occurred (escaped from quarantine) which was successful but unsettling, particularly for those who had a harder time of it last year. Not sure why I ended up doing such a details write up to your inquiry. I suspect it was cathartic.