The quality of life here is ******* great. You wouldn't believe how ******* great it is. I'm self-employed. And when we went into lockdown the government I qualified for the (self-employed version of) the wage subsidy. That meant my business was able to stay alive while the country came to a halt. We've been out of Level 4 since April. No social distancing, no masks required now, no limits on crowd sizes, life is back to pre-covid normal for me and most other New Zealanders. And business is booming.
I appreciate the anecdote, but how do you explain this:
‘We felt we had beaten it’: New Zealand’s race to eliminate the coronavirus again
Where exactly do you live? Do all New Zealander's have your glowing opinion of Ardern? Can anyone else from NZ or AU weigh in here?
So don't worry about my quality of life. How is yours right now?
I live in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Life is pretty good. I play poker at a large poker room in Jacksonville, and I also enjoy playing blackjack on a casino cruise out of Brunswick, Georgia. Masks are required at the poker room, and they spray down and clean chairs and table sections of players as they leave. On the cruise in Georgia, they have a considerably more liberal approach as masks are not required (and barely worn) by patrons, and are required for employees. Just last night I noticed several people hacking and coughing, probably sick from Covid. One of them, a dealer, is a friend of mine, and I had no reservations talking with him at close distance since I'd had the virus in June, and then cleared it with vitamins. I have absolutely no fear of the virus at all, I just have to deal with the consequences of paranoid, irrational people.
The only thing stopping me leaving New Zealand is the fact that most of the rest of the world haven't really got a handle on Covid-19. The thought of leaving here and travelling to a Covid-infested hellhole like the United States of America hold little appeal. There are more people with Covid from the Whitehouse Cluster than the entirety of New Zealand.
Since Covid is mostly a sad joke (the response to which has been anything but funny), I have to take your comment about "covid infested hellhole" about as seriously as you take my comment about New Zealand being tyrannical.
And as a New Zealand citizen I have the right of return to New Zealand as well. I would have to go through 14 days in Managed Isolation: but our Managed Isolation Facilities are all high-end hotels, so that wouldn't be the worst thing. And staying in Managed Isolation would be doing my part to keep the country safe. So not a problem at all.
As far as I know, there are still travel bans to New Zealand for foreigners, correct me if I'm wrong. I would be pretty upset if I had to spend two weeks of my life in a Covid prison upon returning to my country. Perhaps we have dramatically different values.
Fortunately New Zealand has lost zero jobs to hysteria.
We have lost jobs due to the fact that the world is currently at the start of a global pandemic: but New Zealand isn't alone with that. And the last quarterly unemployment figures were much better than expected.
https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/unemployment-rate
4.0%: down .2% from the last quarter, much lower than forecast (6-8%) and pretty much matched the figure from the same time last year. Compared to Australia (7.4) and the US (11.1) I think we have much less to worry about than much of the rest of the world.
The US labor participation rate is only about 63%, which means our 11.1% unemployment statistic is a government fabrication. I don't know whether NZ's is any more credible.
Jacinda Ardern is going to win the next election in a landslide. Because the thing that the elimination strategy has given us is hope. We haven't lost thousands of people to the virus. We don't have thousands more that will have to live with debilitating illness for the rest of their lives. Where do you get this idea that we have no hope here?
LOL.
https://twitter.com/search?q=#nzhellhole&src=typed_query
New Zealand is quite the tyrannical hell hole LOL.
Here is the Covid-19 Stringency Index. It measure the degree of school closures,
workplace closures, and travel bans in place, I've compared New Zealand to Australia, India, the UK, the US and Sweden.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/...01-22..latest&country=IND~NZL~GBR~USA~AUS~SWE
Can you see where we currently measure on the index? We are significantly lower than "the land of the free and the home of the brave" the United States of America. We are lower than the UK. We are even lower than the "bastion' of freedom that inspired this thread, Sweden.
There seems to be a hysteria that New Zealand is a tyrannical hellhole. The reality couldn't be further from this.
With all due respect, New Zealand is a tiny island, with a tiny population. The United States is a massive country with a 330M population, and massive, mostly porous borders. It's completely unreasonable to compare disease intervention strategies between the two countries, as it is for many countries, for a variety of different reasons as have been listed on this thread. Here is a "lol" worthy BBC article about when New Zealand became Covid free,
the first time, dated July 10th:
How did New Zealand become Covid-19 free?
Note that on Feb 2nd, Ardern initiated a blanket travel ban for all foreigners, along with the 14 day mandatory quarantine for nationals. Just a few days earlier on Jan 31st, US president Trump had already initiated the Chinese travel ban, a step which was condemned by his presidential rival Joe Biden as "xenophobic". Clearly, by Ardern's standards it was not even close to xenophobic enough! I am neither a Trump nor Biden supporter nor will I be voting in the next election, but this clearly illustrates the hypocrisy in criticism for Trump's, and more appropriately the USA's national policy re: Covid-19. If only we all resided all small island nations with would be dictators and populations of only ~4.8 million. How does New Zealand compare to North Korea, where Kim Jung Un executes suspected Covid-19 carriers summarily? Sometimes, you just have to kill people in order to save them, I guess.
Which ones do you think we should be using?
As I mentioned before, I think we should be using quality-of-life-years, instead of mortality statistics. I think it's important to understand the aggregate costs of both the virus itself, and the polices made in response.
Well that's the thing. I'm not really a fan of genocide.
Many of them aren't knocking on death's door. And even if they were it would be criminal to expose them to a global pandemic for almost zero material gain. 1 in 5 Maori and Pacific people (among 45-64 year olds) have diabetes compared to 1 in 20 NZ Europeans. If Covid were to be let loose here it would disproportionately target those communities, almost all of them of working age and almost none of them "at death's door."
Would it be criminal, in your estimation, to weld people into their homes, as the Chinese did in Wuhan, or execute people, as in North Korea? Can you name a cost that is too great to bear in order to save these people? How about $50k NZD per citizen. Maybe $100k NZD? What response would you consider "inappropriate"? Remember, you live on a tiny island, so what works there probably isn't appropriate or will work everywhere else.
We can actually test this. As we've already discussed: the virus did manage to get in again recently. It spread in the community for a number of days before it was detected.
What didn't happen was the virus ravaged the country. Because that isn't how any of this works. There isn't a country in the world that is close to herd immunity. We've just witnessed the Whitehouse Cluster and we can see how fast it has spread and its spreading not for a lack of antibodies, but because the Whitehouse has not instituted any pandemic controls. Not enough testing and the wrong type of testing. No masks. No mandatory self-isolation for 14 days. No contact tracing. No deep cleaning. The Whitehouse Cluster is a cluster-****.
The Whitehouse isn't and won't be a *********** because the disease is more of a joke than it is catastrophic. It's killed only one-sixth of the people in the US in 2020 than died of cancer and heart disease combined, and it's projected to kill no more than about one-forth of that number by year's end (roughly 300,000 people in the US). A tragedy, to be certain, but far from the end of the world. I'm sure it will get even worse by the time this is over, but it still doesn't justify the hysteria.
The virus will ravage a country that doesn't have an appropriate pandemic response. "Hoping for enough antibodies" is not an appropriate pandemic response. In New Zealand we had the ability to substantially ramp up testing, tracing and isolation overnight and I'd take that response over "antibodies" any day to keep New Zealand safe.
Planning to keep a blanket travel ban on foreigners in perpetuity? We shall see how that works. I value your anecdote and I believe you when you say you appreciate NZ's Covid strategy, I'm just not entirely convinced you speak for all, or even most NZ'ers.
For the record: Tippit appears to be in favour of killing 29,000 New Zealanders for no apparent material benefit. Is that because you enjoy watching people die, or is there another reason you would like to share with us?
In truth, I am more interested in watching people live freely. Death is inevitable for all of us. Living in fear is not.
Or is it only the 4th time? Never mind. It’s all irrelevant actually because the statistics are being fiddled with on a daily basis. Yet the human species of animal so much WANTS to believe something. 
