[BostonCard]

In terms of determining winners and losers, I believe that the experience of small island nations, with homogenous populations and little international traffic has next to nothing to say to the larger, populous nations of the world. (New Zealand has a population of 4.9 million, IIRC. Santa Clara County alone has a population of 1.9 million.) They seem to me to be outliers that don't signify too much to the direction of history. If the US MSM wasn't frantically looking for a utopia that solved all the problems of covid without consequence, to throw in the face of Trump, I think the basic irrelevance of the examples would be obvious.

If you read closely, my post was not unabashed praise for New Zealand. It might have been "worth it" had the country been able to completely eradicate the virus and prevent it from coming into the country, but alas, the virus is a tricky son-of-a-bitch, and they've had ongoing, low levels of new cases since August.

This piece from the Economist's last week edition sums it up:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/0...d-19-wrong

One problem is the desire to escape a trade-off between shutting down to keep people alive and staying open so that life goes on. The right lauds Sweden for supposedly letting the virus rip while it makes a priority of the economy and liberty. But Sweden has a fatality rate of 58.1 per 100,000 and saw GDP fall by 8.3% in the second quarter alone, worse on both counts than Denmark, Finland and Norway. The left lauds New Zealand, which has shut down to save lives. It has suffered only 0.5 deaths per 100,000, but in the second quarter its economy shrank by 12.2%. By contrast, Taiwan remained more open but has seen 0.03 deaths per 100,000 and a 1.4% fall in GDP.

Alas, the article offers a way out of the trade-off (or, at least to optimize them):

Blanket lockdowns like the new one in Israel are a sign that policy has failed. They are costly and unsustainable. Countries like Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have used fine-grained testing and tracing to spot individual super-spreading venues and slow the spread using quarantines. Germany identified abattoirs; South Korea contained outbreaks in a bar and churches. If testing is slow, as in France, it will fail. If contact-tracing is not trusted, as in Israel, where the job fell to the intelligence services, people will evade detection.

Governments must identify the trade-offs that make most economic and social sense. Masks are cheap and convenient and they work. Opening schools, as in Denmark and Germany, should be a priority; opening noisy, uninhibited places like bars should not. Governments, like Britain’s, that bark out a series of ever-changing orders which are broken with impunity by their own officials will find that compliance is low. Those, like British Columbia’s, that set principles and invite individuals, schools and workplaces to devise their own plans for realising them, will be able to sustain the effort in the months ahead.

There is a way out, so throwing up one's arms and saying that its hopeless and no country can do it right is shirking leadership and responsibility.  Well-designed, targetted restrictions, testing, tracking, tracing, and isolating may be hard and it may require a lot of work to implement, but by and large we didn't even try.

BC

[BostonCard]

In terms of determining winners and losers, I believe that the experience of small island nations, with homogenous populations and little international traffic has next to nothing to say to the larger, populous nations of the world. (New Zealand has a population of 4.9 million, IIRC. Santa Clara County alone has a population of 1.9 million.) They seem to me to be outliers that don't signify too much to the direction of history. If the US MSM wasn't frantically looking for a utopia that solved all the problems of covid without consequence, to throw in the face of Trump, I think the basic irrelevance of the examples would be obvious.

If you read closely, my post was not unabashed praise for New Zealand. It might have been "worth it" had the country been able to completely eradicate the virus and prevent it from coming into the country, but alas, the virus is a tricky son-of-a-bitch, and they've had ongoing, low levels of new cases since August.

This piece from the Economist's last week edition sums it up:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/0...d-19-wrong

One problem is the desire to escape a trade-off between shutting down to keep people alive and staying open so that life goes on. The right lauds Sweden for supposedly letting the virus rip while it makes a priority of the economy and liberty. But Sweden has a fatality rate of 58.1 per 100,000 and saw GDP fall by 8.3% in the second quarter alone, worse on both counts than Denmark, Finland and Norway. The left lauds New Zealand, which has shut down to save lives. It has suffered only 0.5 deaths per 100,000, but in the second quarter its economy shrank by 12.2%. By contrast, Taiwan remained more open but has seen 0.03 deaths per 100,000 and a 1.4% fall in GDP.

Alas, the article offers a way out of the trade-off (or, at least to optimize them):

Blanket lockdowns like the new one in Israel are a sign that policy has failed. They are costly and unsustainable. Countries like Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have used fine-grained testing and tracing to spot individual super-spreading venues and slow the spread using quarantines. Germany identified abattoirs; South Korea contained outbreaks in a bar and churches. If testing is slow, as in France, it will fail. If contact-tracing is not trusted, as in Israel, where the job fell to the intelligence services, people will evade detection.

Governments must identify the trade-offs that make most economic and social sense. Masks are cheap and convenient and they work. Opening schools, as in Denmark and Germany, should be a priority; opening noisy, uninhibited places like bars should not. Governments, like Britain’s, that bark out a series of ever-changing orders which are broken with impunity by their own officials will find that compliance is low. Those, like British Columbia’s, that set principles and invite individuals, schools and workplaces to devise their own plans for realising them, will be able to sustain the effort in the months ahead.

There is a way out, so throwing up one's arms and saying that its hopeless and no country can do it right is shirking leadership and responsibility.  Well-designed, targetted restrictions, testing, tracking, tracing, and isolating may be hard and it may require a lot of work to implement, but by and large we didn't even try.

BC