Alex Davis
theemperorsrobes.blogspot.com
Future 2: New Zealand eliminates COVID-19 and becomes a South Pacific Prison for its Citizens
If we somewhat heroically assume that New Zealand does somehow eradicate COVID-19 then what?
Returning to the house burning metaphor, having burned down our own house to treat bed bugs we come to the horrible realisation that all the neighbours’ houses still have bed bugs. Whatever hope we may have to eradicate COVID-19 in New Zealand, one thing is certain – it will not be eliminated from the rest of the world.
So, what then? New Zealand is confronted with a lose:lose scenario. We can lower the draw bridge and let the world back in, but if we do so it is highly likely we will reimport COVID-19 for three simple reasons:
1. It spreads asymptomatically so you can’t rely solely on symptom-based diagnosis. Testing is required but…
2. Even if New Zealand somehow managed to test every single person entering the country (we had roughly 10.5M international arrivals in Auckland airport alone in 2019 so that is 28,000 tests per day in Auckland alone, vastly above New Zealand’s testing capacity)
3. We know that COVID-19 tests are notoriously unreliable.
Hence it is highly likely someone, somewhere will slip through. There is an excellent summary of the challenges New Zealand faces by Professor Juliet Gerrard here.
What if someone does slip through? Can’t we just “stamp it out”? In short, it’s possible but extremely difficult without reinstituting lockdown. We know for example that up to 25% of the US’s COVID-19 cases came from just one person.
“if we ease the lockdown too much, of course, if there’s a single person out there in the community… it could start again and spread like wildfire.”
Professor Luke O’Neill – School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin.
Controlling COVID-19 once it gets back out into the community without a lockdown will be all but impossible unless New Zealand radically improves its contract tracing capabilities, which it has shown no effective capacity to do since COVID-19 emerged six months ago. One would have thought improving contact tracing would be a high priority but apparently it’s not.
The implications of all this are obvious: if the government re-opens the border a second outbreak is not just possible but probable. If COVID-19 becomes re-established in New Zealand then the country will face the desperate choice outlined above: another lock down or abandoning the entire sacrifice we made through the first lockdown.
On the other hand, what if we chose not to lower the draw bridge, if we keep our borders closed, what then? Eventually COVID-19 will burn its way through the rest of the world – there is no stopping it now. It will become established as just one of the many coronaviruses that circle the globe. The world will move on, borders will re-open and herd immunity will eventually be established.
But New Zealand, isolated behind its 2000 km moat, will slowly but surely suffocate economically, politically and socially. We are a small, isolated trading nation; we simply cannot afford to remain cut off like North Korea from the rest of the world. Forget what academics and politicians tell you about doing business remotely – you can maintain a business that way for some time but you can’t grow one. The hundreds of New Zealand businessmen and women who left their families every week on Air New Zealand flights to grow companies pre-COVID-19 didn’t do so for fun – they did so because they had to.
Suffice to say the economic growth we use to pay for our schools and hospitals, our cars and houses, will trickle away. The future of our children will become the future of children cut off behind the Iron Curtain, stifled and stunted by governments “protecting them” from the rest of the world. If you want to see what New Zealand looks like under this future look to North Korea, Venezuela or Cuba or any of the Soviet Bloc countries pre the fall of the Berlin Wall. For a more detailed explanation of some of the consequences of turning New Zealand into the prison of the South Pacific see here.
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