Elimination ‘Strategy’ = a Bullet to the Stomach for NZ

In late March, just days after first denying she was going to force the country into lockdown a lugubrious looking Jacinda Ardern waved around the “flatten the curve” graphic and told us that if COVID-19 was unchecked “our health system will be inundated and thousands of New Zealanders will die” and that consequently New Zealanders now needed to sacrifice fundamental civil liberties and their livelihoods to “save lives”.

There are two critical observations from that press conference.

First, it is now increasingly clear that Ardern misled the country with the claims that there would be tens of thousands of deaths. In an excellent and courageous piece of research (read it here) economist Ian Harrison (who has worked for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements and specialises in risk modelling) demolished the fundamental research on which the government relied for compelling the country into lockdown.

No doubt the Ardern government will first dissemble, distract and deny this fact. If that doesn’t satisfy the usually quiescent media expect to see the University of Otago COVID-19 Research Group go under the bus as the government claims it simply “relied on the advice it was given.”

Except this is either a bald-faced lie or chronically incompetent. Let’s be charitable and assume it’s the later: Ardern’s incompetence stems from that fact that no one, anywhere, in any position of authority, ever should take a decision of that magnitude without double and triple checking the facts on which they are relying. Ardern didn’t. If one-man band economist Harrison can figure this out why couldn’t the government’s army of advisors?

Nevertheless, emboldened by a public terrified by hysterical, wall to wall reporting from the Legacy media, the government doubled down and so we found ourselves locked into lockdown, with all its unintended consequences. Consequences which will be severe, long lasting and almost certain to do more damage than COVID-19 will or could.

Which brings us to the second point from that infamous press conference. The lockdown we were told was all about “flattening the curve”, to stop our health system from being “swamped.” But then a funny thing happened: the health system (like those offshore here and here and here) didn’t end up getting overwhelmed at all.

So, like slaves chiselling a pretender pharaoh’s name from the pyramids the flatten curve graphics were quietly removed from the press conferences and in the legacy media. They were replaced with a new message this time, “elimination.”   The Prime Minister stated: “We will step down to level 3 in a way that is consistent with our goal to eliminate COVID-19 in New Zealand.”

To be fair to Ardern you could justify the change in course if it was going to work. No one should be expected to pursue a strategy that is clearly flawed solely for political expediency (except of course she has before.)

The problem, of course, is that this new strategy is a), as hopelessly flawed in its empirical justifications as the original strategy, and b) worse, even if succeeds it will cripple New Zealand for years to come.

First, elimination means just that, elimination, and no one outside New Zealand is taking that possibility seriously. Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, told a New Zealand parliamentary committee April 14 that eradicating the virus is a “nirvana” scenario. The reasons the elimination strategy is extremely unlikely to be successful are surprisingly simple:

1. The R0 value of the coronavirus is high and it spreads asymptomatically, so in short, it spreads extremely easily, making containment with anything short of a lockdown impossible.

2. Upwards of 80% of those who contract the virus have no symptoms (ie never feel sick at all) which makes tracking the virus extremely difficult unless you implement mass population testing and contact tracing at a level far beyond New Zealand’s capacity (our contract tracing system has been described as a dinosaur).  

3. The tests the government plans to rely on to identify COVID-19 are well known to generate both false negatives and false positives.

4. It is estimated the number of unidentified cases is between 8 and 10 times the real figures, meaning New Zealand is likely to have tens of thousands of people carrying COVID-19 with no symptoms.

In short, it is almost inconceivable that New Zealand can eliminate COVID-19 without maintaining a permanent lockdown. Which begs the question: if we weren’t flattening the curve and we can’t eliminate it then why did we go into an economy crippling, poverty inducing, long term public health-damaging lockdown?

But, just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that somehow New Zealand achieves the impossible and we do eliminate COVID-19 – what then? What happens when the dog chasing the car actually catches the car? The rest of the world will still have COVID-19. As mentioned, no one, anywhere else in the world is even considering this strategy. New Zealand will become a de facto prison for its 4.9M “citizens.”

Large scale inbound travel to New Zealand will be effectively eliminated, and with it the tourism sector, our largest export earner, contributing $45 billion to GDP annually. Without offshore tourism, Air New Zealand will become a domestic-only airline, so expect few flights to or from our fair shores (great news if you are a hard-green environmentalist, curtains for tens of thousands of employees).

With few onshore flights, the opportunities for New Zealanders to travel offshore will become few and expensive – say goodbye to that holiday in Europe or 2 weeks in Fiji and look forward to 2 weeks quarantine when you return home. It’s also very difficult to grow an international business entirely through Zoom so expect the slow but steady strangulation of New Zealand’s export-orientated businesses. Likewise expect prices of imports to surge and with the virtual elimination of immigration and a collapsing economy, walled off East Germany like from the rest of the world, property prices to fall.

And all this assumes that there are no slip-ups. But as Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician at Canberra Hospital who advises the Australian government on COVID-19 states: “the reality is this virus is everywhere, it’s all around the world. So even if you’re successful for a short period of time, how long do you do this for? Six months? Two years? Invariably, you’re going to get the virus re-introduced.” As Steven Joyce succinctly put it the “idea that we would get rid of COVID-19 is pie in the sky fantasy”

Proponents of the elimination strategy argue that “Colditz New Zealand” won’t be needed for more than 18 months and all we have to do is wait for a vaccine. However, there is no guarantee we will get a vaccine. As David Nabarro, professor of global health at Imperial College, London, and an envoy for the World Health Organisation on COVID-19 states: “You don’t necessarily develop a vaccine that is safe and effective against every virus. Some viruses are very, very difficult when it comes to vaccine development – so for the foreseeable future, we are going to have to find ways to go about our lives with this virus as a constant threat.”

Neither will anti-body testing be any more effective, with even the World Health Organisation warning that “there is no evidence that people who have recovered from coronavirus have immunity to the disease [and] there is no proof that such antibody tests can show if someone who has been infected with COVID-19 cannot be infected again.”

In short, there is a very, very real risk that the cavalry is not coming for New Zealand. We could be trapped here for a very long time – like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings – “we cannot get out.”

Finally, we need to consider even if an effective vaccine was developed just how high up the priority list is New Zealand really going to be? If you are handing out vaccines do you prioritise the 5M people at the bottom of the world who are at no immediate risk or other 7.5 billion who are? The US and China are already hoarding and interdicting Personal Protection Equipment – what makes us think a vaccine will be different?

In short, the government’s whole COVID-19 “strategy” from start to finish has been flawed. It was based on flawed modelling and amplified by hysterical media reporting. And now New Zealand’s plan to “eliminate” the virus looks more like a bullet wound to the stomach, the result of which will be a long, painful and lonely death.

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