New Zealand's Covid-19 Response: Explained.

A look at how New Zealand was able to be so successful in their Covid-19 fight, their strategy of elimination compared to UK and US policy and how before any country could recover economically they had to tackle the public health crisis.

CORRECTIONS:
1) I misspoke and said the 1917 flu pandemic. This is of course false, the pandemic occurred in 1918.
2) At 5:31 I state that areas have to go into 'the most stringent lockdowns' when any Covid cases are reported. I was trying to get across that the lockdowns were very stringent compared to international standards. However, Auckland only went to alert level 3, rather than 4 - so the lockdown was not the 'most stringent' for New Zealand.
3) At 5:17 Ardern is giving a briefing with the Finance Minister, not the Director of Health.
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I'm not an epidemiologist. Feel free to critique me down in the comments. I do, however, try my best to back up everything I say with reliable sources - see below.
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FAQs:

1) How can you compare New Zealand to the UK or US when they have much larger populations and New Zealand is much less densely populated?

It's pretty clear that NZ has a vastly smaller population than either the US or UK. However, Covid-19 transmission - unlike many other metrics such as GDP - does not grow relative to country size. If you look at this graph linked below, you can see that the growth of the virus was very similar in all countries (2-day doubling time). Hence, the population difference seems not to have made transmission in NZ lower in a 16statistically significant way.

Even if you look at any of the metrics in relation to population size (eg. Deaths per capita) still NZ has done vastly better. NZ deaths per million: 5.39. UK deaths per million: 1851.65. US deaths per million: 1614.23
Graph: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=New+Zealand&location=US&location=United+Kingdom
2) Why didn't you speak about the great trust of government and adherence to lockdown rules in New Zealand?

Didn't mean to downplay this factor - certainly people not taking the virus seriously have had a terrible effect on many countries' outbreaks. However, I wanted to point to tangible things the UK government could have done better.

Stating that the UK's population took Covid-19 restrictions less seriously (some denying the virus completely) presents two problems:
1) As far as I'm aware, there's not been any comparative studies on public acceptance of covid-19 restrictions so anything I did say wouldn't have been sourced.
2) Even if it was clear that New Zealanders took the virus more seriously, it's hard to draw any policy recommendations for the UK gov from this, other than improving communication.
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Very much inspired by Vox and the work of Johnny Harris. I wanted to learn after effects, so I thought why not make a vox style explainer.

Please note: I am not an epidemiologist. I just read some articles (see below)

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7436486/#mja250735-bib-0005
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53274085
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/01/04/how-new-zealand-eliminated-covid-19/
https://www.ghsindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-Global-Health-Security-Index.pdf
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/new-zealand-covid-how-beat-coronavirus-free-lockdown-quarantine-coronavirus-cases-739493
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025203?query=featured_coronavirus
https://assets-global.website
files.com/5e332a62c703f653182faf47/5e868bb638376249c360942f_Baker%20FINAL.pdf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55733357
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4907
https://theconversation.com/data-from-45-countries-show-containing-covid-vs-saving-the-economy-is-a-false-dichotomy-150533
https://ourworldindata.org/
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/

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Видео New Zealand's Covid-19 Response: Explained. канала Jacob Liebenberg