8 ms·

New Zealand has been basically isolated and Covid free for the past year. Their population is approaching 95% vaccinated. It would be interesting to see statist

by jmpman 5y ago

New Zealand has been basically isolated and Covid free for the past year. Their population is approaching 95% vaccinated. It would be interesting to see statistics on heart disease rates in their population over the past year, as we could then be certain any increase is vaccine related and not Covid related.

xupybd 5y ago
We had over 400 for the first time today. Soon our Covid free status will end. Omicron is unstoppable.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  Omicron is not unstoppable. See mainland China. See Taiwan.
  - jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
    What has Taiwan done that NZ has not?
    - rjzzleep 5y ago
      China has applied the rules to everyone(although you get really fancy quarantine facilities if you're important). There is also interprovince quarantine requirements. Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.
      - Accacin 5y ago
        Yeah my wife went back to China to visit family recently, and on arriving in Shanghai had a 21 day quarantine. To even be able to fly there she had two COVID tests prior to leaving UK, and one when she arrived in Finland (on way to China).
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      I'm not as familiar with Taiwan's measures, but the biggest difference between mainland China and New Zealand, in my view, is that China does mass testing. When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland. In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection. What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
  - PunchTornado 5y ago
    omicron is endemic in a lot of parts of the world already. it will never dissapear. china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely.
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      Really? They've made it 2 years now with small outbreaks in the low hundreds of cases. It seems they are adapting and keeping up their quarantine measures just fine. Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
    - dqpb 5y ago
      > china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely. But isn’t this exactly the level of control the government wants to maintain indefinitely?
  - brainphreeze 5y ago
    Trusting the numbers that come out of China, yeah right. Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
      It's not necessary to trust the numbers. If they had large outbreaks, we would know. We are talking about a country of 1.4 billion people which has plenty of contact with the outside world, it's not North Korea. They could cook the numbers but it would just be impossible to hide widespread community spread.
      - qbasic_forever 5y ago
        And we can be darn sure the CIA would be screaming from the rooftops of all its propaganda outlets the perceived failings or weaknesses in China's COVID response. The silence there is all you need to hear to know what's up.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      First off, accusations of being a shill go against HN rules. Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail. Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case. The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports. Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening. So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
  - tim333 5y ago
    China has now had lockdowns in about half a dozen cities where omicron has been detected. It seems more slowed down than stopped.
    - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      First, a "half dozen cities" is nothing in China. Currently, the largest city under lockdown is an out-of-the-way city near the border with Vietnam that almost nobody outside of China has even heard of (I'd wager most people in China aren't even familiar with the city): Baise (百色市). All the major cities are open. Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over. There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
      - tim333 5y ago
        I remember Zhong Nanshan, China's Dr Fauci equivalent saying, in Feb/Mar 2020 I think, that if the rest of the world followed China's policies covid would be eliminated by June (2020). I wish we'd actually done that. Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
    - tzs 5y ago
      China's approach has been interesting. For any given city or area they are in one of two states: 1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal. 2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns. They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
      - 5y ago
mikevm 5y ago
Ugh, do you not realize that the vaccine does not stop you from getting and transmitting the virus?
- doubleunplussed 5y ago
  Pre-omicron, it did. Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination, before even getting much third dose coverage or vaccinating children. Omicron is sufficiently immune-escaping that it changed that, but I continue to be surprised how many people don't realise that the vaccines were actually very effective at preventing infection and transmission for pre-omicron variants. Edit: I don't mean they prevented infection and transmission 100%, obviously. But for two doses the total reduction in transmission was like 80%, and higher still for three doses. This is more than most people (other than Australians and NZers who watched vaccination bend the curves in real time) realise, from the way people talk you'd think the vaccines barely reduced infection and transmission at all.
  - exodust 5y ago
    > Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination. This is false and shows you don't understand how the covid vaccines work, and you don't know what happened in Australia. I live in Australia and we suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Cases were kept low because states closed their borders, not allowing anyone in. People were locked down in their homes, not allowing anyone out. This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates. We had strict curfews; we had 5km travel limits enforced by cops and "ring of steel" checkpoints. It was illegal to go the beach; it was illegal to take your kids to the park; it was lawful for cops to chase and attack people for not wearing masks outside. We had overzealous state premiers granting themselves new powers. We had propaganda campaigns of fear - our government hired young actors to die slowly on ventilators... (https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4 https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4)... when the rest of world chose constructive public health messaging, we went for "shock and awe" to scare people into not going outside. Yet, here you are claiming we had "herd immunity"! Do you realise that not everyone takes the vaccine at the same time, and that only a small proportion of vaccinated people at any given time have the full protection offered before the vaccine fades? That window of time being as little as 4 months? Herd immunity was never more than wishful thinking.
thejosh 5y ago
Western Australia has half the population of NZ and has been mostly covid free as well (until we decided to open the borders).
- smhg 5y ago
  Would you mind to be more specific? What do you mean by 'until open borders'? Air and/or sea? How were domestic and international related infections different? Were containment measures different for both?
Youden 5y ago
Not a bad idea but how would you control for other factors like diet and lifestyle?
jcbrand 5y ago
It can be both. It's already known that vaccines increase rates of Myocarditis, especially amongst young males. It seems to be that the spike protein is responsible for this, which is present in both the virus and the vaccine.
- scotty79 5y ago
  I think this is far from estabilished. I think increase in myocarditis in young males could be fully explained by how they changed their (social) behavior after getting their second dose after a year of lockdowns. Exposing themselves to additional risks including covid which we know the vaccine doesn't protect completely against.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    My anecdotal experience doesn’t chime with this. I got myocarditis with a covid infection in Apr 2020. Then again, starting almost exactly 24 hours after my first vaccine dose just as other flu-like symptoms kicked in. The rates are low, but I’m pretty sure it can have this effect.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      I think any immune response could trigger miocarditis in you. You got it after a covid vaccine but you might have gotten it after another vaccine or a flu or a cold. Probably prior infection to covid put you at greater risk of getting miocarditis for any reason. I hope it'll get better for you in the long run. Take care.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > It's already known that vaccines increase rates of Myocarditis, especially amongst young males. An Israeli study showed an incidence rate of 2.13 cases/100k people [1] - the common incidence rate for myocarditis in the US is ~22/100k [2]. COVID-19 itself has a 146/100k incidence of myocarditis, in contrast [3]. So please, stop spreading that "vaccines increase the rate of myocarditis", there is no evidence that supports this. And especially, get vaccinated because the complications from COVID-19 are way worse both in severity and rate. [1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737 [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109716364658?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073510971... [3]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
That's certainly an important year over year comparison that would be very illuminating about the actual heart-related risks of the vaccine. It is important though that we focus this comparison on New Zealand itself, as far too many studies have been comparing countries with disparate ages and obesity rates while using vaccinate rates as the only relevant metric.

by jmpman 5y ago

xupybd 5y ago

We had over 400 for the first time today. Soon our Covid free status will end. Omicron is unstoppable.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
Omicron is not unstoppable. See mainland China. See Taiwan.
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
  What has Taiwan done that NZ has not?
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    China has applied the rules to everyone(although you get really fancy quarantine facilities if you're important). There is also interprovince quarantine requirements. Apparently Taiwan is playing with fire again. They have 3 weeks of quarantine(two in real isolation and 1 where you have to avoid crowds yourself), but apparently contrary to official policy some business travellers have been offered 3 day quarantine(that's how their "second" wave happened, 3 day quarantine for airline staff). The offerings were made in private meetings and not in writing though. I guess everyone learned that paper trails are bad if you want to keep outrage and accountability low.
    - Accacin 5y ago
      Yeah my wife went back to China to visit family recently, and on arriving in Shanghai had a 21 day quarantine. To even be able to fly there she had two COVID tests prior to leaving UK, and one when she arrived in Finland (on way to China).
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    I'm not as familiar with Taiwan's measures, but the biggest difference between mainland China and New Zealand, in my view, is that China does mass testing. When the outbreak began in Auckland last year, New Zealand was testing about 20k people a day. At that rate, it would take months just to test the population of Auckland. In contrast, when a Chinese city has an outbreak, it will test the entire population of the affected neighborhood or city within days. That will be repeated every few days, until the public health authorities are confident that they have identified all of the clusters of infection. What happened in New Zealand is that the public health authorities were never able to identify all of the infection clusters. They did a lot of contact tracing, but cases kept showing up that they couldn't trace back to previously identified cases. There was a low level of cryptic spread in the population that they never got a handle of. Mass testing would have addressed that problem, but New Zealand doesn't do it (and probably doesn't have the capacity in place to do it).
- PunchTornado 5y ago
  omicron is endemic in a lot of parts of the world already. it will never dissapear. china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    Really? They've made it 2 years now with small outbreaks in the low hundreds of cases. It seems they are adapting and keeping up their quarantine measures just fine. Look at the Olympics going on in Beijing right now. It's halfway over and hasn't caused a surge in cases. When Tokyo had the olympics this summer there were major outbreaks and rises in cases through the entire city, and Japan was left with a major nationwide surge in the aftermath of the games. It doesn't look like China is going to face nearly as bad of an outcome.
  - dqpb 5y ago
    > china cannot adopt quarantine measures indefinitely. But isn’t this exactly the level of control the government wants to maintain indefinitely?
- brainphreeze 5y ago
  Trusting the numbers that come out of China, yeah right. Taking a look at your post history, you seem to spend a considerable amount of time defending China, what's up with that?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    It's not necessary to trust the numbers. If they had large outbreaks, we would know. We are talking about a country of 1.4 billion people which has plenty of contact with the outside world, it's not North Korea. They could cook the numbers but it would just be impossible to hide widespread community spread.
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      And we can be darn sure the CIA would be screaming from the rooftops of all its propaganda outlets the perceived failings or weaknesses in China's COVID response. The silence there is all you need to hear to know what's up.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    First off, accusations of being a shill go against HN rules. Second, the numbers that come out of China are reliable. I actually think we have a much better picture of what's going on in China with CoVID-19 than we do in almost any country, because the case numbers are low enough that each case is publicly reported in detail. Not only is there a daily rundown of the number of new cases in each city, but details about each case are published for contact-tracing purposes. When there are cases in a city in China, an itinerary of where the infected person has been over the past week or so is usually published, along with the person's rough address, age and occupation. Sometimes the family name is published as well. Often, there are requests from the authorities for people who were on specific trains or in specific places at specific times to get tested or quarantine, because they overlapped with a known case. The measures taken on the ground match up very well with the case reports. If the case reports say that someone in building X has been infected, building X will be locked down, and people in the neighborhood will have to get tested. The converse is also true: you don't see buildings getting locked down or neighborhoods getting tested in the absence of specific case reports. Finally, life has been close to normal in China for nearly two years now. If the virus were spreading, that wouldn't be possible. You can't have open restaurants and pubs without having massive waves of infections, and that simply isn't happening. So yes, I trust the numbers. Pretty much everyone who has any experience in / connection with China believes that the numbers are at least roughly accurate.
- tim333 5y ago
  China has now had lockdowns in about half a dozen cities where omicron has been detected. It seems more slowed down than stopped.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    First, a "half dozen cities" is nothing in China. Currently, the largest city under lockdown is an out-of-the-way city near the border with Vietnam that almost nobody outside of China has even heard of (I'd wager most people in China aren't even familiar with the city): Baise (百色市). All the major cities are open. Secondly, if you follow the different outbreaks in detail, you see that the Omicron outbreaks are not just being slowed, but completely extinguished. The outbreaks in Tianjin and Beijing look like they're over. There will continue to be small, isolated outbreaks that occur when the virus slips through the border quarantine measures. However, China has showed that it is perfectly capable of extinguishing these small outbreaks one-by-one.
    - tim333 5y ago
      I remember Zhong Nanshan, China's Dr Fauci equivalent saying, in Feb/Mar 2020 I think, that if the rest of the world followed China's policies covid would be eliminated by June (2020). I wish we'd actually done that. Early covid was a bit easier to stop I think than omicron. Both China and Taiwan have had over 50 cases a day since mid Jan which illustrates it's hard with this one.
  - tzs 5y ago
    China's approach has been interesting. For any given city or area they are in one of two states: 1. Wear masks when indoors away from home. Lots of testing. Other than that it is pretty much life as normal. 2. Lockdown. Real lockdowns--not the kind of "lockdown" people complain about in the US where lots of things remain open. China lockdowns are the "go home and do not step out of your home for weeks" lockdowns. They switch from state #1 to state #2 when they get a COVID case in the city. They switch from state #2 to state #1 when they have no more COVID cases in the city.
    - 5y ago

mikevm 5y ago

Ugh, do you not realize that the vaccine does not stop you from getting and transmitting the virus?

doubleunplussed 5y ago
Pre-omicron, it did. Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination, before even getting much third dose coverage or vaccinating children. Omicron is sufficiently immune-escaping that it changed that, but I continue to be surprised how many people don't realise that the vaccines were actually very effective at preventing infection and transmission for pre-omicron variants. Edit: I don't mean they prevented infection and transmission 100%, obviously. But for two doses the total reduction in transmission was like 80%, and higher still for three doses. This is more than most people (other than Australians and NZers who watched vaccination bend the curves in real time) realise, from the way people talk you'd think the vaccines barely reduced infection and transmission at all.
- exodust 5y ago
  > Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination. This is false and shows you don't understand how the covid vaccines work, and you don't know what happened in Australia. I live in Australia and we suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Cases were kept low because states closed their borders, not allowing anyone in. People were locked down in their homes, not allowing anyone out. This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates. We had strict curfews; we had 5km travel limits enforced by cops and "ring of steel" checkpoints. It was illegal to go the beach; it was illegal to take your kids to the park; it was lawful for cops to chase and attack people for not wearing masks outside. We had overzealous state premiers granting themselves new powers. We had propaganda campaigns of fear - our government hired young actors to die slowly on ventilators... (https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4 https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4)... when the rest of world chose constructive public health messaging, we went for "shock and awe" to scare people into not going outside. Yet, here you are claiming we had "herd immunity"! Do you realise that not everyone takes the vaccine at the same time, and that only a small proportion of vaccinated people at any given time have the full protection offered before the vaccine fades? That window of time being as little as 4 months? Herd immunity was never more than wishful thinking.

thejosh 5y ago

Western Australia has half the population of NZ and has been mostly covid free as well (until we decided to open the borders).

smhg 5y ago
Would you mind to be more specific? What do you mean by 'until open borders'? Air and/or sea? How were domestic and international related infections different? Were containment measures different for both?

Youden 5y ago

Not a bad idea but how would you control for other factors like diet and lifestyle?

jcbrand 5y ago

It can be both. It's already known that vaccines increase rates of Myocarditis, especially amongst young males. It seems to be that the spike protein is responsible for this, which is present in both the virus and the vaccine.

scotty79 5y ago
I think this is far from estabilished. I think increase in myocarditis in young males could be fully explained by how they changed their (social) behavior after getting their second dose after a year of lockdowns. Exposing themselves to additional risks including covid which we know the vaccine doesn't protect completely against.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  My anecdotal experience doesn’t chime with this. I got myocarditis with a covid infection in Apr 2020. Then again, starting almost exactly 24 hours after my first vaccine dose just as other flu-like symptoms kicked in. The rates are low, but I’m pretty sure it can have this effect.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    I think any immune response could trigger miocarditis in you. You got it after a covid vaccine but you might have gotten it after another vaccine or a flu or a cold. Probably prior infection to covid put you at greater risk of getting miocarditis for any reason. I hope it'll get better for you in the long run. Take care.
mschuster91 5y ago
> It's already known that vaccines increase rates of Myocarditis, especially amongst young males. An Israeli study showed an incidence rate of 2.13 cases/100k people [1] - the common incidence rate for myocarditis in the US is ~22/100k [2]. COVID-19 itself has a 146/100k incidence of myocarditis, in contrast [3]. So please, stop spreading that "vaccines increase the rate of myocarditis", there is no evidence that supports this. And especially, get vaccinated because the complications from COVID-19 are way worse both in severity and rate. [1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737 [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109716364658?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073510971... [3]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

That's certainly an important year over year comparison that would be very illuminating about the actual heart-related risks of the vaccine. It is important though that we focus this comparison on New Zealand itself, as far too many studies have been comparing countries with disparate ages and obesity rates while using vaccinate rates as the only relevant metric.