They do have a very proactive government that deploys experimental technology in highly public pilots. That you doubt it’s not true is purely because it’s an African country.
Maybe what he's getting at is that the technologies the west "can't dream of" were invented in the west. Drones, for example. The west doesn't use drones to deliver medicine because it has very well developed infrastructure to deliver medicine.
It is cool Rwanda is doing this but I would guess the west has dreamed of drone deliveries of things and decided that its current system is ok.
Some of techs I dream about are cheap personalized immunotherapies, batteries made out of simple materials with high densities, fusion, artificial general intelligences that are smarter than us...
New Zealand also is a relatively isolated warm island nation with far less international travel to it than literally the rest of the Western World. So please excuse me with all of the tribute to it for its performance.
And NZ tourism is mostly during our summer, so Jan/Feb/Mar are busy. “Tourism is New Zealand's biggest export industry, contributing 20.4% of total exports.“
> warm island nation
Irrelevant: compare NZ to states with equivalent temperature and population in say February and then compare your death rates.
Yeah - people have to remember that they've grown up with maps where the northern hemisphere is twice the size of the southern. In reality NZ is roughly as long as the west coast of the US and covers roughly the same latitudes (and range of climates, though they're not as continental).
We have been very lucky that the govt put incoming people into voluntary lockdown quite early, China first, then everywhere - that means that lots of cases occurred in isolation and didn't spread (seems like we've received probably more cases from the US than elsewhere), of course some people were stupid, we kicked out some tourists who wouldn't do it.
5 new cases yesterday nationwide, and a continuing lowering trend. Still ~400 people with active cases so we have to be careful - we're nominally getting out of "level 4" lockdown next week, our "level 3" is roughly where California is now, that's predicted to last 2 more weeks - then apart from international travel, and at risk people still taking care we will largely be back to normal. Of course one mistake could scupper all of this.
New Zealand has a healthy tourist industry, and Auckland is effectively the capital of Polynesia, so it has a lot more air travel than you might think. Also, if isolation were such a large factor, why is New Zealand doing so much better than (for example) Iceland? NZ has a lower growth rate than Fiji, Maldives, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Isolation might be a factor, but it seems to have less effect on outcomes than when and how nations responded.
> New Zealand doing so much better than (for example) Iceland?
They are only doing so much better if you define better solely in terms of deaths (about 14x per capita). The difference is that New Zealand locked down; Iceland had much more modest restrictions (and did very well overall with containing the epidemic - a bit better than say the locked down Bay Area)
The interesting question is if "deaths/capita" is the correct and only metric. Both countries are basically at the end of their curve and Iceland lets say might lose about 200 years of life (using some worse case guesses for currently hospitalized) or about 5 hours a person.
What's better for the average person? A 4 week lockdown or life expectancy dropping by 5 hours?
We can actually answer these questions rather than just guessing.
In 2018, 3.82 million people flew into NZ, an increase of 1.2 million over the previous year. Iceland meanwhile received 2.3 million people in 2018, most from the United States, which is in line with historical averages of around 2 million.
Kiwi’s have good common sense and when needed can pull their shit together. I’ve compared few countries in Google’s Mobility report and no other country reduced their activity as much as NZ!
Fortunately, Taiwan exists and is better than everyone else so we have a high-water mark for competence to compare to.
Denser than America, cooler than Lousiana, closer to Wuhan than any part of America, more travel to/from China, poorer than America, better than America at dealing with this crisis.
But you are excused, you don't have to comment at all.
But since you did comment, are you certain that lack of immigration and "warmth" explain the discrepancy between their results and America's? Or Italy's? Or Canada's? Or (as another commentator points out) British Columbia?
Please go into more detail about the relative impact of these factors, and why you think they are more important than the choices New Zealand made.
It's not "warmth" but Summer. Drop the smug attitude and fairly compare it to other places in the Southern hemisphere. It's not a simple climate difference but an inversion of seasons.
British Columbia is part of Canada and thus borders America. It has a city of ~3 million people (Vancouver), which is an hour's drive from Seattle (pop ~4 million) and the US west coast. It has one of the most active ports in North America and is a jumping off point for cruise ships, overseas travel to Asia and numerous other flows of people and good. The other user is making a fairly dishonest comparison of BC and New Zealand by looking just at population and none of the other factors that have led to the differing results during the pandemic.
Accusing people of dishonesty is not aligned with the HN guidelines. If you disagree with their point of view, perhaps criticize the comment on its merits, rather than accusing a fellow contributor of dishonesty.
There's a difference between accusing the contributor of being dishonest and saying the argument is dishonest - e.g. ignoring central contridictory facts.
Louisiana: Home to one of the largest commercial shipping ports in the world, serving as an import/export hub for the largest national economy in the world. Has extensive land borders with said nation and large amounts of interstate travel daily.
New Zealand: Has a small export market largely focused on agriculture and a small tourism market. Is an island nation over 1300 miles away from the nearest other significant economy. All movement in/out of the nation has to go through tightly controlled ports or airports.
I don't understand why HN users always jump into these things like it's a cage fight. The right way for you to respond is to help us collectively arrive at truth (which your qualitative statement aids mildly in) and leave out all the parts that claim bad faith from your fellow users. Jesus Christ, I even included density which points the opposite way. Now because I don't have a preconceived notion of which direction I want the results to show why NZ is performing better, I can conclude that the result is either:
* The factors described are washed out by the other factors
* These factors don't have a significant impact
* It isn't any of these that determines difference in outcome between NZ and others but action taken
No wonder you guys hate social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram if you run around calling everyone insincere at the first sign of the mildest degree of disagreement.
I don't know if I would call New Zealand's tourism market small. Small compared to New York or London maybe but relative to the size of the country, it's GDP and population? 3.8 million people visited New Zealand in 2019[1]. The population of New Zealand is only 4.8 million.
I agree on the isolation. I lived in NZ. As someone from North America, it was strange how isolated it felt. Especially outside of Auckland. As for density, I disagree. Most of the country is empty but the cities are surprisingly dense by North American standards considering the population size.
I've never been to NZ but the data is utterly against that. The most dense city in NZ (Auckland) has 2418 people/km^2, and Christchurch is about half that. Wellington is 1918. [0]
By contrast every US city in this table [1] is way above that, with the lowest being 3889.4. (New Orleans, surprisingly, is a mere 783 [2].)
That's interesting. I wonder how they calculated the area. There's no way Yonkers is twice as dense as Auckland in a practical sense (I would guess it's similar). As for Wellington, there's a very limited amount of space to build on because of the topography. As a result, houses are small, streets are narrow, cars are small (I had a difficult time driving a tiny hatchback). The CBD is unusually big and dense for a city with a metro population smaller than Madison, Wisconsin. The airport is shoehorned in to the only flat space in the region. So why does it have a low density? I'm assuming undeveloped regions are being counted here. I suspect density in terms of "used space" is quite high. Totally anecdotal obviously.
In both Australia and New Zealand, the number of visitors from overseas is a red herring. The world didn't bring the novel coronavirus to us: we went there and brought it back.
For example, under the old normal, on the order of 1 out of 1000 people in Britain were Australians! I don't know exactly how New Zealand compares, but they wouldn't be far behind.
I think the differences between, say, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, France, Germany and Singapore are pure dumb luck. The virus spread through mega-churches in France and Korea; they were doing exactly the same things in Rooty Hill, but no one who turned up happened to be infected. New Zealand bogans haven't discovered cruise ships yet. Melbourne's international student accomodation got lucky, Singapore's guest worker dormitories didn't. And so on.
Don't get me started on Australian federalism. The Commonwealth decided to let the virus in and suppress it, ignoring the fact that the states were committed to blowing a trillion dollars on lockdowns the moment it turned up in volume. At least we can blame federalism; what excuse does New Zealand have?
Apparently there are different strains of Covid-19 floating around. There has been speculation that NZ (and Australia) may have largely been hit by a less aggressive version of the virus than, say, Europe.
NZ gets tourists from everywhere (3.6M tourists in nation with 5M population), and 1/3 of cases are NZers returning home from all over the world (we travel internationally a lot).
I don’t have the sequencing, but there is no reason to think NZ would only “catch” one strain.
> The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in most patients across Europe, while the milder strains were the predominant varieties found in parts of the United States, such as Washington State, according to their paper.
> A separate study had found that New York strains had been imported from Europe. The death rate in New York was similar to that in many European countries, if not worse.
It's no so much that a particular area only has one strain, but that the predominant strain that takes hold may have more favourable outcomes.
There is zero reason to think there is a “predominant strain that takes hold” in NZ. We get a lot of tourists from Asia, Europe and the US. Early on, the majority of cases in NZ were returning kiwis, who returned from all over the world.
NZ is highly connected because (a) it is a world tourist destination and (b) NZers travel all over the world (including a lot to Europe).
And yet the article i've linked to has researchers saying different areas (which are as well, if not, far better connected than NZ) have predominant strains with differing characteristics.
There is rank speculation about strains and temperatures - some of it based on case rates and death rates which is just pointless if comparing NZ and say the US because our situations are radically different.
1/3 of NZ infections are returning NZers, making up the vast majority of initial infections detected weeks ago.
The community transmissions are spread around the country, and unlikely to have a single super-spreader as the source. Our health system (including ICU wards) is vastly under-utilised at present, so any cases are getting the best care possible, and we have first world healthcare. There is no elective surgery at present, and our hospitals have been funded by our socialised healthcare. We could do with more PPE gear, but we have sufficient because our health system is not overloaded, because our government listened to good advice.
Let’s pick NY as comparison: confirmed “132,467 cases, including 9,101 confirmed coronavirus deaths and 4,582 probable coronavirus deaths“. Assuming death rate 0.5% after 3 weeks, then actual cases is in the millions. With that sort of community transmission then strains could make a difference. NY state has approx 4x the population of NZ, and 1000x more deaths.
NZ has a few thousand cases, NY has a few million cases. NZ acted fast and hard as soon as community transmission was detected. That explains the difference in deaths, and you can’t jump to any conclusions about death rates because the relevant numbers are too imprecise.
Either way, I expect NZ will sequence the different clusters, so in time we will know
Still worth a shoutout for shutting down even with very few cases per day. If you're going to end up with a quarantine regardless that's the best time to completely shut down. There were 5 new cases yesterday and there doesn't seem to be major instances of an undiagnosed population. They have a chance of completely eliminating this internally.
Australia is the same way at the moment too. 20 new cases total yesterday and there doesn't seem to be a major section of the population undiagnosed. The new cases seem to be coming from known pockets of infection (people living together, etc.).
There's a real chance life may get back to normal in these two nations with the exception of international travel without waiting for a cure/vaccine.
As a reference, here is a map that shows international tourism arrivals per country from 2018. I don't know if it proves any causes in relation to your point about international travel but it shows some correlation.
I dunno, even up in BC here it's been warmer than that these last couple weeks and I would in no way describe where I live as a 'warm place'. At least on the coast. It gets pretty warm in the interior in the summer though.
Sure, but you described NZ as a "warm island nation", you didn't say that it's warm there lately. Where I am in Minneapolis it will be in the 70s–90s in a couple months, but I wouldn't call Minneapolis a "warm city".
I'm reading Pathway of the Birds, about Polynesian voyaging, navigation and settlement with a focus on NZ, and there's a whole chapter "Settling New Zealand: Adapting to a Cool Land", which was something the early settlers had to do because they came from genuine warm islands in tropical Polynesia.
Most companies are not going to go fully distributed. Partial remote? Sure. Maybe a few full remote roles set aside for superstars? Sure. But mass distributed remote? Highly unlikely. This experiment hasn’t gone that well.
I think your third point is mostly strong. I see most companies going to partial remote but staying in their current locations. For growth to 2nd/3rd tier cities to dominate we’d need to see stronger job growth there than in major metros, or for near universal remote work. Also with this huge recession most people will be more hesitant to move without a secured job. I think your assertion is correct.
This isn’t any surprise, we will see a swelling of growth in Westchester, Long Island, Southern Connecticut, and Northern New Jersey, especially if partial remote work stays normalised as well. I don’t see a massive exodus out of the metro area, but the suburban share will likely grow.
Growth in those areas is supply-constrained, though. There aren't a ton of available homes; construction lags demand; there isn't all that much undeveloped land left in those counties; and they'll all be resistant to denser zoning.
CRISPR and its various offsprings will grow in technological sophistication and their commercial applications. By the end of the 2020s it will morph into a pressing political issue in the West in terms of its implications for Human biology. Certain East Asian countries will be the trendsetters due to lax governmental regulations and societal acceptance.
