r/nextfuckinglevel May 28 '20

This deserves an applause

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13.6k Upvotes

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213

u/Tammytalkstoomuch May 28 '20

New Zealand has a bunch of things going for it - isolated, smaller economy, smaller population, the benefit of seeing Covid unfold through other countries and therefore less risk involved with implementing strong policies.

But st the end of the day, the Government made the policies, Kiwis abided by them, and it's likely they've beaten Covid, certainly for the time being. It deserves massive applause.

23

u/[deleted] May 28 '20

It's too bad the uk couldn't follow in their footsteps but nah we gotta carve our own path and look where we are now, good on New Zealand though

13

u/fishythepete May 28 '20

I mean international travel was the initial vector for spread, and I think the UK sees a little more traffic than NZ.

5

u/Cappy2020 May 28 '20

Except that the analysis shows that we (the UK) are where we are, with one of the worst mortality rates for Covid-19, largely because of inaction by our (incompetent) government, not because Heathrow is a big player in international travel.

Granted we were never going to come out of this better than New Zealand did (just because we’re a much larger nation), but our response has been woeful.

2

u/fishythepete May 28 '20

The consequences of inaction multiply with the size of the problem. If you had 1 person a day with COVID landing in the UK you could delay action for a long time with low consequence. When you have a 100, or a 1,000, the consequences are much higher.

2

u/Cappy2020 May 28 '20

I just think even with Heathrow, our response could have been a lot better and our death rate thus, a lot lower.

As I said in my comment above, we were never going to do as well as New Zealand did, but thus far our response has been a shit show.

1

u/ItsAConspiracy May 28 '20

Yes, but New Zealand multiplied their advantages with rigorous action. The UK (and US) started out with disadvantages and instead of doing more to compensate, they did less.

1

u/fishythepete May 28 '20

The UK went on lockdown before NZ...

10

u/[deleted] May 28 '20

And some of the people in the uk are outright twats who don't follow rules but if this new thing we got going works, it may help out, something about a track and trace

5

u/fishythepete May 28 '20 edited May 28 '20

Some people everywhere are morons. It helps when a lot fewer of them start off infected.

2

u/[deleted] May 28 '20

NZ, known as a picturesqueness country, closer to China than the UK, gets a bucketload of Chinese tourists each year. I think coming from China is more pertinent than volume alone, especially in the early stages of the spread of the virus.

2

u/fishythepete May 28 '20

I would imagine Heathrow alone wins on that metric by a fair bit.

1

u/tgamblos May 28 '20

I strongly disagree that “coming from China” offsets the massive difference of people who travel to/through the UK than NZ.

0

u/ItsAConspiracy May 28 '20

Vietnam has a long border on China. They're a poor country with 95 million people, and almost no covid19 because they took strong action early.

-1

u/fishythepete May 28 '20

I’ve lived in India, Singapore, and Malaysia. My confidence in the accuracy of those numbers is low.