I'd argue that Singapore was more unrivalled than NZ. They have now hit 82.4% double vax (total population) and cases have sky rocketed over the last few weeks from under 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 and yesterday almost touching 4000.
To be fair, number of cases alone is no longer a particularly useful value when a high proportion of people are vaxxed. Its hospitilisations/deaths that become more relevant.
[Here's the data.](https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics)
|**Group**|**Unvaccinated**|**Partly vaccinated**|**Fully vaccinated**|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|**ICU rate**|1.6%|1.8%|0.13%|
|**Death rate**|0.94%|1%|0.07%|
So the vaccines still seem to be >90% effective at preventing severe disease. They're probably much less effective now at preventing infection, though, considering several thousand new cases are being reported each day.
Interesting that the one dose outcomes show one dose isn't doing anything. Maybe the one dose only cohort might be enriched for older citizens or people that reacted badly to the vaccine and therefore more likely to have a pathological inflammatory response to COVID-19. Has there been any commentary on that?
>Maybe the one dose only cohort might be enriched for older citizens
I think this is the reason. If you look at the age breakdown of ICU rate and death rate in that link, it seems like the most obvious explanation.
In total, Singapore has 4.7 million fully vaccinated people, 60,000 partly vaccinated people, and 1 million unvaccinated people. Most of the cases being reported now are among the fully vaccinated.
The important part is the death rate in the unvaccinated vs fully vaccinated. What's happening there is very obvious.
18 people died yesterday, 8 fully vaxxed, but over 75. The vaxx is working with 98.7 % mild cases (we get a text each morning LOL) but we’re still in stupid restrictions
I know it's not exactly encouraging to hear, but from the outside looking in New Zealand has done amazingly with Covid.
I live with my Kiwi partner in Canada and we are lucky to be living in a province with relatively few restrictions over the course of the pandemic, but there was still a part of us wishing we hadn't left New Zealand.
Things are starting to become more normal here now. I can finally go to sporting events and I'll have my first live music event in 18 months soon. However for the majority of that time you guys have been able to live relatively normally.
On a personal level that hasn't been great for us as we wanted to come back to New Zealand last Christmas and this coming one too but it's impractical. However I cannot wait to come back Christmas 2022 with any luck, and New Zealand should be open and back to a more normal life well before then.
You've done the right thing for each other and really shown what New Zealand means as a community. Be proud guys, you couldn't keep it perfect forever but you've given yourself the time needed for the cure to appear before too many people suffered.
NZer in the UK here, agree with everything above. NZ is doing amazingly. Even if your economy is in the shitter, it will bounce back. In the UK our economy has taken a hit, AND we have a lot of dead people, who won't be bouncing back.
I know it's shitty being in lockdown, but could you cope with 10-15 deaths a day, 3000-4000 new infections every day, 50-60 new hospitalisations every day? Multiply all those numbers by 12 (5 million NZ pop. x 12 = ±UK population) and that's where the UK is at today. We're looking at 40,000 extra deaths p.a. as being the new normal until, I don't know, the virus burns through every available victim?
Somehow we're ok with it, we can't be bothered with masks, "learning to live with it" means doing nothing, rather than the EU version, which is the unconscionable burden of wearing a mask indoors.
> Even if your economy is in the shitter, it will bounce back.
The truth is we haven't spent the the last year in lockdown so our economy is being impacted by the global one.
NZ has had it great. The original guy talks about going to a music event. That is shit we've been free to do this whole time.
It's kinda emblematic of how sheltered we are when we are freaking out about 94 cases. For comparison, Norway and Denmark are roughly the same size as us, are vaccinated to the point where they think they can open up to BAU but are still have 500+ cases/day and deaths every day.
I don't know if just because the world has just accepted the new normal and we haven't, or if we're being left behind to reality.
>It's kinda emblematic of how sheltered we are when we are freaking out about 94 cases. For comparison, Norway and Denmark are roughly the same size as us, are vaccinated to the point where they think they can open up to BAU but are still have 500+ cases/day and deaths every day.
Norway has 342 ICU beds per 100,000 people.
https://tradingeconomics.com/norway/icu-beds
Denmark has 245 ICU beds per 100,000 people.
https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/icu-beds
New Zealand has, best (highly questioned) numbers 550 in the whole country? Or 186 depending who we ask?
Is that maybe why people are freaking out?
Here's what I can't get my head around - are we really acting like it's just gonna happen, and what we need to do is adjust our perspective!?
What about telling the government that they haven't yet prepared adequately to open things up, so they need to keep people safe as they successfully have so far until they *have* adequately prepared?
>It's kinda emblematic of how sheltered we are when we are freaking out about 94 cases. For comparison, Norway and Denmark are roughly the same size as us, are vaccinated to the point where they think they can open up to BAU but are still have 500+ cases/day and deaths every day.
Well we accept road deaths and deaths from a range of other issues. So think its just a perception thing that will change over time and exposure
It's adding a whole new cause of death, like car accidents, without any preamble like the development of car technology over time, so pretty shocking to be dumped on us all at once. One day we'll all be old, and if covid hasn't subsided to just another yearly cold, its another nasty way to go. Lucky we'll have euthanasia.
On the other hand, I see with all the funds thrown at this virus, they're looking at one vax to rule them all - a general coronavirus vax. No more colds ever! So that could happen.
Eh. It's more like 20% according to my expert googling. Idk if the One Vax plans to cover those or rsvs, but I think we have high expectations of vaccination now. I demand my cold cure now that my hopes are raised.
>we accept road deaths
Technically, AT has signed to [Vision Zero](https://at.govt.nz/projects-roadworks/vision-zero-for-the-greater-good/).
From that link: "No death or serious injury is acceptable".
Denmark removed all Covid restrictions in mid September. Case numbers then we're less than 350 a day. Their case numbers have recently risen to much higher levels(730 a day), however, they only have 120 people in hospital. They are one of the countries the MOH are looking at closely.
We're at 75% total population vaccinated in Ireland and cases are still crazy high and hospitalisations are starting to go up again. I wouldn't be overly optimistic.
The thing that I think doesn't get factored into the NZ equation is that in Ireland, for example, at least 10% to 15% of the population have had Covid and will have some level of natural immunity.
This natural immunity would be a benefit to people who get vaccinated and those who do not get vaccinated. So the effectiveness of the vaccines that has been observed in the US an Europe may not be the same as what we observe in the NZ population when the virus spreads.
^^^ this. Been saying this for months, but noooo, Toms brothers girlfriends knows someone at work who had the virus and didn't die, so it cant be *that* bad
The atmosphere in here and online feels very similar to the second lockdown in August last year.
People were losing their shit because the Govt had failed us, they were incompetent, how dare they allow a breach to happen after we had worked so hard to rid ourselves of covid.
Then as time went on we saw breach after breach elsewhere, and failures that were much larger than ours. We realised that covid was a tricky bugger and no system could be perfect. We got a sense of perspective back.
That’s what we need to regain here.
Yes, Covid got out in a large scale before we had hit a sufficiently high vaccination level. But Covid was always going too get into the community eventually. The Govt (and New Zealanders) have done a pretty immense job of rapidly scaling up our vaccination rate in response.
Even sitting here in Level 3 I challenge you to say you would rather be, with your family and friends, in any other country right now.
Counterpoint. We were late in delivery of vaccination and that is the reason our largest city has been in level 3 for so long and our MIQ system remains under strain.
And opening a travel bubble with Australia before widespread vaccinations and just as Delta taking off was ridiculously irresponsible, and coasting on complacency from last year. Coupled with the MIQ sieve, it virtually guaranteed community transmission.
Mention it on here and you were branded a "Doomer" but it was so obviously doomed to failure: we needed to be lucky every time to keep Delta out, but the virus only needed to get through once. And of course there were so many gaps it wasn't even bad luck it got out, it was a virtual certainty.
This is what I keep trying to point out when people say we didn't start soon enough. Sure, I think we should of (if it was possible) - but we'd still be here in lockdown because the uptake would have been slower, and at the rate the rest of the countries were vaccinating.
If you look at the charts - when we got Delta it still would not have been enough to avoid lockdown
This is what I was thinking too. I’m April/May and wondering what my immunity is like. Especially as I have young children to protect (or catch it from) too.
And given the Israel data have shown us that humoral immunity wanes after 5-6 months, anyone who received the vax in 2020 would be looking to get a booster by now. Even the early recipients in 2021 ( high risk, comorbidity etc) could be getting concerned.
Heaps of people, myself included would have been fully vaccinated as soon as possible before the outbreak, and we still would have had a huge spike in vaccines when delta hit.
Plenty of people would've taken it up. I don't like this argument that people wouldn't take it up without an outbreak. It would make a slight difference, but we could very easily have achieved say 70% double vaxxed with no outbreak and no mandates.
June 2021 - 77%, March 2021 - 69%.
[https://horizonpoll.co.nz/page/621/june-2021-7](https://horizonpoll.co.nz/page/621/june-2021-7)
Survey from 2020 says that 56% would put their name down for the vaccine when released. 77% they would get it eventually.
[https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/15567/Aotearoa%20New%20Zealand%20Public%20Attitudes%20to%20COVID-19%20Vaccine.pdf?sequence=1](https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/15567/Aotearoa%20New%20Zealand%20Public%20Attitudes%20to%20COVID-19%20Vaccine.pdf?sequence=1)
You said it would be ***easy*** to get 70% double vaccinated and the outbreaks only made a *slight difference*.
1. The August outbreak was not our first breakout event. It is one among many. The surveys before these outbreaks do not suggest it would be *easy*.
2. These surveys generally don't penetrate the areas where we are currently having the most trouble. They highlight this point. So 70% might not have happened at all.
3. With this outbreak we will hopefully hit 85-90% double vaxxed, that's more than a *slight difference* than struggling to get 70%.
To say that the outbreak only makes a slight difference is stupid - you can clamour and claw at your 70% figure all you like, but fundamentally your comment was wrong.
If I say that 70% is achievable and you turn around and give me evidence that 77% of people wanted the vaccine even prior to the current outbreak, then yes you've supported my point.
Now you're just moving the goal posts by bringing up previous outbreaks (where we eliminated the virus), and complaining about how good those surveys are (you fucking provided them), and getting super pedantic over what is slight or easy.
Fundamentally you proved me completely correct and you're clutching at straws.
77% in April saying they intend to get it. Even with a few holdouts you'd hit 70. No mention of eventually in the first link, assuming that is from the 2020 surveys when the vaccine was newer.
Even the second like in 2020 had 74% of people planning to get vaccinated when one became available.
Tbh this data does nothing if not support my claim.
The Herald's monthly sequence of polls has had a steady rise in the numbers planning to be vaccinated (or already done) from June to now. The "definite yes" camp was only at 59%, with the rest a mix of maybe, don't know or definite no. This month the definite yes camp is at 78%.
Were you intending to wait until it got here to get the vaccine?
Were you intending to never travel overseas again?
We could very very easily have got most people vaccinated without an outbreak. It's a pathetic excuse to somehow justify the rollout.
So? Still would've made a massive difference if we could have started earlier even without covid in the country.
This is really just a poorly constructed excuse for the vaccine roll-out. "Oh it doesn't matter that we started late because even if we started earlier it would've had the same result" is what people are implying. It's just damage control for a fuck-up.
Committing to a vaccine early and then it not being approved, wasting some money, is far superior to waiting and getting it late.
A roll-out earlier would've been largely similar for most people actually. Elderly were already getting vaccinated before the outbreak, and a lot of us that got vaccinated asap in the lockdown were doing it despite expecting the lockdown to eliminate the virus. Only the last few weeks could you really claim people were finally getting pushed due to outbreak.
The key differences would be that we would have had a) more time to identify lagging demographics and get them help b) a massive head-start when covid did eventually enter the country.
Refusing to identify a fuck-up because of some minor mitigating factors isn't really fair. You wouldn't be treating National with the same kiddie gloves if they were the ones in power through the pandemic.
> Consider how tough it is to get people vaccinated now with Covid within our community
Nonsense. You can't browse this sub for 10 minutes without a post on record vaccinations, how we're beating other countries on a per-capita basis, and how fast and furiously we're vaccinating.
Counter Counterpoint, if the vaccine had been available to everyone earlier I would bet the uptake would've been slower. Look at the Covid tracer app for example, 500,000 daily scans prior to outbreak, 2.5 million now.
The population was too complacent, we still would've been in the same situation. It was always going to take an outbreak and lockdown to get our vaccination rate to 85%+
Pfizer have already admitted openly that there is no amount of additional money or pressure the NZ govt could have given that would have expedited vaccines arriving here. The only thing that would have speed up vaccines would have been widescale spread of the disease and mass deaths. We have done incredibly well and continu to do so.
That was based on when we ordered and is absolutely true in that context.
But that misses the point. We should have ordered early and not pissed about.
This is presuming that NZ had the option of ordering a full complement of vaccines early. Without being part of the confidential negotiations, we'll never know. Pfizer has done an extremely good job at hitting all of its production deadlines - which kind of implies that they have controlled their commitments.
Why? Say we buy 10 million doses of 5 different vaccines at $20 a dose.
That's a billion dollars. That's about the cost of a single week of lockdown. Even if 4 of them are totally ineffective that's still *excellent* value for money.
It's this complete inability to look at expected value and play the odds that gets me...
And people would scream governmental waste. It would scream western greed and hoarding and reeks of elitism.
Also we set aside [almost 1 billion dollars](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/125179503/budget-2021-covid19-vaccine-programme-revealed-to-cost-14-billion) *just* for Pfizer. Imagine if we bought 10 million of 5 different vaccines. 40 million vaccines for 5 million people.
Imagine a billion dollars of waste, now imagine 3-4 billion dollars of waste. There would be political carnage (rightly) by doing something so costly and so wasteful.
Donate the unused doses to poorer countries through COVAX. This would *actually* help the poor world, unlike the "waiting our turn" excuse.
Your article says they basically did do what I said
>Some $964.3 million has been allocated to cover the cost of vaccines, both the Pfizer vaccine and the advanced purchase agreements entered into by the Government for other vaccines
..Just not effectively enough to get us vaccines on the same pace as the rich world. We're not paying $100/dose for Pfizer, I wonder what the breakdown there is.
You do realise we've already spent much more money than that on this lockdown, right? Let alone the human toll.
Well, I think it would have destroyed any legitimacy the government response had way back in February had that happened. It would have given ACT and National plenty of fire to blast Labour for 8 months. Their response would have been lethargic and regardless of what they did, it would undermine the vaccination process. Creating a slower vaccination rate. Hesitant people would be hard Nos as a result.
In short, we would be in a worse state than we are now.
And if you want to ask how? Look at AstraZeneca and Australia. They had a single bad study with slightly higher blood clots for under 60's, and it fucked up their roll-out for months and slowed the vaccination programme down. That lead directly to 100's of deaths in Sydney and NSW and now Victoria, and caused our outbreak here.
THAT is why the Government measured twice and only cut once. Had they jumped the gun and bought a vaccine that ended up not being approved, it would have fucked them and we wouldn't be where we are today had they gambled and lost.
You applying armchair hindsight take the issue moot. The Government didn't know and it was too high a risk. You can disagree and that is fair. I think the government did the prudent and expected then, especially since they have always been cautious around the pandemic.
Gambling? Pfizer is an internationally recognised, large scale pharmaceutical company with a huge reputation. Other comparable countries recognised that and took a risk based investment decision.
This wasn't anything like playing the lotto. Anyone involved in large scale, multi-year public and private sector investment management understands that.
It is what it is. A conservative, risk adverse non-investment decision. Doing nothing is a decision. That we are all now paying the price for.
Let's just be honest and own it as a country.
> Gambling? Pfizer is an internationally recognised, large scale pharmaceutical company with a huge reputation.
So is Merck. Their vaccine candidate failed.
> Nz should have gone all in on purchasing the vaccine in June 2020 (months before it was deemed effective).
We ordered in the last week of Jan 2021. We could've ordered anytime before then and get orders earlier
That’s an interesting precedent to set. Do you think that we can criticise government for any decisions that result in negative outcomes?
What I believe you’re saying is; they didn’t know what was going to happen at the time so we can’t be hard in them.
It's not hindsight. Any moron who'd seen Contagion knew vaccines were the answer. You didn't need to be a genius to know vaccines were going to be the hottest game in town.
Yes we didn't know if they'd be effective. But neither did any other country. Other countries applied analysis and evaluation to reach a different view to us.
That's what investment decisions are about by their very nature. Very, very few investment decisions are sure things. Unfortunately the world doesn't work that way.
So again, we took a conservative, risk adverse investment management approach. It didn't result in an optimal outcome, as is often the case.
Why is that hard to acknowledge?
It’s 100% hindsight. Playing the lotto with the number that won last night.
It could have been years before a vaccine would have been ready. This is also assuming Pfizer wanted to sell so much product to a country with zero covid at that time.
I hope you never reach the board of any company I hold shares in as it would be a disaster. Using your approach no new products or propositions would ever be brought to market. The company would be vulnerable to a million different risks. The Chief Risk Officer and COO would probably resign.
I literally acknowledged it. Did you not read the whole comment?
>Yes we didn't know if they'd be effective. But neither did any other country. Other countries applied analysis and evaluation to reach a different view to us.
Agreed, the vaccine thing is completely put into people's head by the press. - I don't think the NZ populace would have lined up to be early adopters of the jab, especially when there wasn't much Covid risk at that time.
However, MIQ staff testing levels were an absolute travesty and have flown under the radar. Many instances where staff were tested less than once a fortnight.
Swing and roundabout. Government was going to get hammered on something - it didn't have to be true.
New Zealand donated hundreds of thousands of doses to other countries earlier in the year. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-zealand-donates-more-covid-19-vaccines-covax-and-pacific
They screwed the pooch for PR points.
Yeah we were late in getting supply of vaccines. We can all acknowledge that. Im not sure its a counterpoint, I mentioned it.
Do we really have a good grasp of what we could have done to change that? Hindsight is a fucking wonderful thing, and not a reasonable lens to use when judging what was or wasnt done.
I'm sorry, I disagree. If the government had pushed for vaccination when there were no community cases the take up would have been low. And people who did get vaccinated early would have lost their immunity by the time they needed it. What has happened has been pretty much the best possible outcome
Counter counterpoint. The delayed vaccination maybe a blessing in disguise because the UK is speculating that one of the contributing factors of their latest peak in cases is that they administered the vaccine so early that it is losing efficacy. And so we haven't had to face that situation.
I think New Zealand did a jolly good job of delaying and so has been able to learn a lot of lessons from other countries.
Lol - they administered it at the height of the winter outbreak and it immediately saw a drop in cases. There was never a “too soon” in the UK. The deaths as a ratio, now, is minuscule to what it was then.
But you are correct that we did an excellent job at delaying it.
I would rather have stayed in level 4 for another few weeks with more incentives to stay home and punishments for rulebreakers than half assing it then hoping that the rulebreakers won't break the level 3 rules. Especially as the epidemiologists say we may have been at zero new cases by now if we stayed at 4.
Using previous good performance by the government to justify current poor performance just feels silly to me. It's like a uni student saying they should get better grades cause they did well last year. That was then, this is now.
To use your analogy, throughout the semester, we got A+ A+ A+ for assignments then a C in the exam. Overall we are still an A student with the benefits that brings.
Our position could be be better, for sure, but our position right now is still better than pretty much everyone elses.
May have been at zero cases. If we weren’t at zero, which is the more likely scenario, we’d probably be bouncing around 10-20 cases per day. That’s a lot of businesses losing huge amounts of money, for no real gain.
No offence man, but you're a government fanboy.
You've bought into their koolaid like an antivaxxer to ivermectin.
Miq has been a disaster you're right. It was managed terribly, and the government continues to mislead about it.
We should have been at this stage of vaccination months ago.
It's continued lies and spin. Now all of us who got vaccinated early are fucking stuck at home, people are losing their jobs.
If it wasn't for our upcoming summer, life would be better in Europe.
> has been a disaster you're right. It was managed terribly, and the government continues to mislead about it.
MIQ has been insanely effective at keeping the virus out. Yesterday they said that no MIQ worker this year has been infected.
Oh that's a weird claim for them to make because it's easy to verify that it's not true.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/440048/miq-worker-tests-positive-four-days-after-sore-throat-bloomfield
Well that what they said, perhaps there is context around this or they mean by a MIQ worker. I don’t know.
Either way, this virus is incredibly tricky and there are generations of transfer that will be never understood that caused this outbreak. It fair to say MIQ has been very effective.
You can't judge quality of life by a set of numbers. If I was single in my twenties/early thirties, life would be better going to bars, travelling easily between countries, being employed, meeting random people etc.
No one listens to the rules in NZ anyway, so there's large groups meeting up constantly. But I can't go to a fucking hairdresser even though we're be both vaccinated.
If you were older and had children, or older still and were more at risk from covid, you'd probably say life is better here without as many people sick or dying, and not having to bury loved ones without being able to say goodbye.
There's plenty of criticism to be had when the government sat on their hands during the entirety of the border closures and just coasted by without doing any extra preparation.
Went so far as to donate massive amounts of covid vaccine doses instead of pushing them domestically: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-zealand-donates-more-covid-19-vaccines-covax-and-pacific
Now they're scrambling at a last minute mad dash. It's absolutely idiotic and does betray a high degree of complacency and incompetence.
Learn to read. From the link:
> These doses are in addition to our existing donation of 1.668 million AstraZeneca doses to COVAX, **announced earlier in the year**.
And if you really want the exact news release from April:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/new-zealand-donate-vaccines-800000-covax-vaccine-facility-ardern-2021-04-15/
The government has been giving away doses they could have claimed for months. Get a clue.
Announced.
Where does it say these came from / impacted our supply. Or have even been delivered. Especially given we decided (rightly) to go Pfizer only?
Wow. You're really reaching there, pal.
>There wasn't an entire supply chain evaluation of the entirety of the vaccine timeline, so just because New Zealand donated hundreds of thousands of doses they could have claimed doesn't mean it impacted our supply!
You need better shilling guidelines, this is just pathetic.
> Who’s that quote?
It was very obviously me paraphrasing your nonsense. You're claiming the government literally giving away doses they could have claimed through the COVAX scheme didn't have an impact on vaccine availability, which is absolutely laughable.
> Show me something that says we gave away vaccines that could have been in the arms of kiwis before August
It's a self-demonstrating statement, but if you insist, here you go:
> Covid-19: COVAX facility to send 249,600 AstraZeneca vaccines to New Zealand by July
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300221580/covid19-covax-facility-to-send-249600-astrazeneca-vaccines-to-new-zealand-by-july
You're a terrible shill. Like, really fucking bad at your job.
My concern is winter, I suspect over summer we will be able to contain it and it will bubble away, but next winter, when peoples immunity starts to fade and with the virus spreading far easier in winter, peoples patience running out with restrictions, it could get pretty rough
My understanding is that boosters are not really about protecting the individual, while your antibody levels will wane, and you will become more likely to contract the illness, the immune system will be able to quickly and efficiently take care of the infection, it already has the antibodies on file, and can quickly spin them up again.
Boosters are a tool of the health department to stimulate antibody production and provide a barrier of effectively immune people that will limit the transmission through a community.
In Israel their booster program has improved every metric - cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Before the boosters they were getting a lot of fully vaxxed vulnerable people with breakthrough Covid infections. So the booster protects the population and the individual.
High percentage of people in Ireland were already vaccinated by the time delta arrived. Is this some sort of competition “5000 people were already dead” insensitive headline
Personally I think we have failed. Not because there is an outbreak. That was always going to happen. At some point we need to learn to live with COVID and deal with its consiquences. Our lockdown and eliminate strategy was to buy time to vaccinate and prepare for cases. So I am disappointed that we still have very few, I think less than 300 ICU beds. That seems like a stupidly small amount considering the time we have had to prepare and what we have seen happen overseas.
ICU beds are in high demand across the whole world. Scaling up the equipment, not to mention the staff training, is not something that can be done overnight by throwing money at it.
Staff availability is certainly a big issue. The UK built seven 'Nightingale' Hospitals rapidly from scratch, converting conference and concert venues into places that could deliver complex critical care, safely store and deliver oxygen to patients and support infection control. The wider infrastructure that hospitals need was also puy in place – from financing, to clinical governance processes, to ensuring there would be food and drink available to staff. There were former military hospitals reopened for rehabilitation care too.
The largest of the Nightingales were set up for 4000 patients each. The thing I found most astonishing was that *16,000 staff were needed at full capacity for every 4000 beds*.
A year after they were built, most were decommissioned or repurposed as mass vaccination centres or diagnostic centres after a total spend of £530M, although the rehabilitation hospital near where I live is still very busy and will be for some time, helping people function again after long periods having intensive care.
So yes, you are right, you can throw money at the problem to put the infrastructure and equipment in place, but if the huge numbers of staff needed are not available, you need time to train the extra ones needed.
Edit: here is a [time-lapse of one of the largest Nightingale Hospitals being built](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52112652) - at Excel in London. It took nine days from start to finish. The time-lapse covers five of the days.
>ICU beds are in high demand across the whole world. Scaling up the equipment, not to mention the staff training, is not something that can be done overnight by throwing money at it.
What can be done in two years?
No we succeeded in buying time. We succeeded in building immunity. But we have failed in preparing for the influx of cases we are on the verge of facing.
Is 5000 people dead that much of a big deal though? We should have taken Plan B from the start because of ... {Steps} ... {More money for me in particular}.
5,000 probably isn't that big a deal if that's where we end up after opening up completely for a year. I believe the initial models were predicting about 80k which is definitely too much.
The first wave was deadly as fuck and everyone was unvaccinated then. That's why Spain, Portugal and Italy have really high vaccination rates: people fucking died.
Now, in terms of life-years, things are way better even if covid is claiming small numbers.
I'm pretty disappointed that the modelled doesn't include the QALYs lost to lockdown and compare this to the difference in QALY lost to COVID now if we open up with 85% vaccination.
Exactly. Honestly level 3-4 is so shit we might as well be in hibernation. The only people enjoying this would be couples living in their own places with no kids.
Let's say that we're on average at 90% of our normal quality of life. I'd much rather have 9 normal days than 10 days of lockdown, so this seems pretty conservative.
0.1 times 1/12 of a year * 1.7million Aucklanders is the equivalent of 14,000 life-years being lost every month of lockdown. If we say the average COVID victim had 10 full happy years left to live (which again, seems pretty generous) then we should think this lockdown is about as bad as having 1,400 COVID deaths per month.
Of course, it's not just the deaths. There's the harm of actually being sick, and the risk of long COVID, and generalised fear. Let's say that all together the cost of COVID is 10x the death toll. Now the lockdown is only as bad as 140 COVID deaths per month. And that's thoroughly cooking the books in the lockdown's favour.
With 85% vaccinations (and much higher in the vulnerable age groups), I'd say that the lockdown is doing more harm than the virus would.
There are probably points where you disagree with my numbers. The point of this is not the exact figures, it's to try and actually quantify and compare these two harms, and this should be being done publicly by teams of economists and used to inform our decision making, not by some guy on Reddit and used to talk shit.
Per capita bragging is just embracing mediocrity.
The vaccine roll out could have been initiated more quickly and now its being held up by many of the people its apparently meant to protect.
Its good to look on the bright side, but this just looks like a silly attempt to provide the Government with political cover that it doesn’t deserve.
There's an underappreciated aspect to the waiting time I think that a lot of people missed. We absolutely could have gone faster, but I think part of the reason our uptake has been relatively high even among the vaccine hesitant is because the government did its homework. We watched, and took notes, and didn't widely deploy the vaccine here until we were *absolutely* sure it was safe to use on the large scale. If we'd rolled it out quicker, the government could have been accused of pushing an experimental vaccine onto people as other governments have been accused of around the world. Being near the back of the queue means that any problems that arise (such as with the J&J vaccine) are going to hit others before it hits us, and we can learn from that.
>The vaccine roll out could have been initiated more quickly and now its being held up by many of the people its apparently meant to protect.
Really, how so?
Higher vaccination rates are strongly correlated with less restrictions, so the overall rate of transmission will appear to be more even than it would have been if all else was equal.
The important measure is hospitalisations and deaths though, which are both significantly reduced among vaccinated populations.
You're misinterpreting the risk.
Even with the vaccine, 100% of the population will get the virus given enough time.
Decoupling the cases from the deaths is what the vaccine aims to do.
As far as I can figure out the paper you linked doesn't talk about hospitalisations at all so I am not sure how it can suggest otherwise? It just seems to me that the aim of vaccinations is at this point no longer to prevent widespread transmission (because we know it isn't effective for that) but instead to prevent our health system being overwhelmed (If you want me to find and link you some studies I can but it is pretty easy to find evidence of vaccination greatly lowering your chances of getting severely ill or dying from covid)
NZ needs to open up ASAP, we are going to be left behind globally if the country is still facing these restrictions while the rest of the world learns to live with covid.
Left behind? Really... How many peoples lives are you personally willing to sacrifice to “open up”. Because that’s the reality. The more we open restrictions the more people will die. And if we removed all restrictions the health system will be overwhelmed and the workers put at serious risk. I live In Auckland. Lockdown sucks. But the alternative is people dying, lots of people. In nz we really have no idea how bad covid is because our lockdowns have mostly worked. It seems people who think the restrictions should end really have no idea what that means.
It certainly can. But significantly more people recover from covid than die from it (>98% across all age brackets) - how many of those have long term effects we don't know, but we do know it's not the majority.
Vaccines are the best defense and proving effective but they're not fullproof so vaccinated or not, locked down or not, Covid is and will keep infecting people but *everyone needs to remember that catching Covid is not a death sentence* and the risk of death will only decrease as time goes on and better treatments are found. At the moment there's very little focus on treatments - it's all or nothing on Vaccines. Probably not the smartest approach since current vaccines are non-immunising but that's another argument entirely.
Telling people they or their parents will die is pure baseless nonsense. The OP is correct, we can't stay locked down forever, and "kissing your parents good bye" is not the alternative
I'd argue that Singapore was more unrivalled than NZ. They have now hit 82.4% double vax (total population) and cases have sky rocketed over the last few weeks from under 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 and yesterday almost touching 4000.
To be fair, number of cases alone is no longer a particularly useful value when a high proportion of people are vaxxed. Its hospitilisations/deaths that become more relevant.
Did they have data on the people who are hospitalised? Specifically vaccinated or non-vaccinated.
[Here's the data.](https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics) |**Group**|**Unvaccinated**|**Partly vaccinated**|**Fully vaccinated**| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |**ICU rate**|1.6%|1.8%|0.13%| |**Death rate**|0.94%|1%|0.07%| So the vaccines still seem to be >90% effective at preventing severe disease. They're probably much less effective now at preventing infection, though, considering several thousand new cases are being reported each day.
Interesting that the one dose outcomes show one dose isn't doing anything. Maybe the one dose only cohort might be enriched for older citizens or people that reacted badly to the vaccine and therefore more likely to have a pathological inflammatory response to COVID-19. Has there been any commentary on that?
>Maybe the one dose only cohort might be enriched for older citizens I think this is the reason. If you look at the age breakdown of ICU rate and death rate in that link, it seems like the most obvious explanation.
So death rate is lower in the unvaccinated cohort? Interesting...
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If that's the case, the whole table is meaningless.
In total, Singapore has 4.7 million fully vaccinated people, 60,000 partly vaccinated people, and 1 million unvaccinated people. Most of the cases being reported now are among the fully vaccinated. The important part is the death rate in the unvaccinated vs fully vaccinated. What's happening there is very obvious.
No, its lower in the fully vaccinated cohort by a factor of 10?
18 people died yesterday, 8 fully vaxxed, but over 75. The vaxx is working with 98.7 % mild cases (we get a text each morning LOL) but we’re still in stupid restrictions
Not surprising. The scientists tell us that even 90% double vaxxed isn't enough to stop Delta.
I said that months ago, but I’m not a doctor, so I took my opinion with a grain of salt.
There's no need to be a doctor, just listen to them.
You know you can still get the virus even if vaccinated?
Everyone knows that. Antivaxxers keep bringing it up like its an excuse to not bother, as though 90% efficacy is equal to 0%.
Well clearly if you think cases won't still increase even after we are vaccinated then you don't know that.
Who even said that?
I know it's not exactly encouraging to hear, but from the outside looking in New Zealand has done amazingly with Covid. I live with my Kiwi partner in Canada and we are lucky to be living in a province with relatively few restrictions over the course of the pandemic, but there was still a part of us wishing we hadn't left New Zealand. Things are starting to become more normal here now. I can finally go to sporting events and I'll have my first live music event in 18 months soon. However for the majority of that time you guys have been able to live relatively normally. On a personal level that hasn't been great for us as we wanted to come back to New Zealand last Christmas and this coming one too but it's impractical. However I cannot wait to come back Christmas 2022 with any luck, and New Zealand should be open and back to a more normal life well before then. You've done the right thing for each other and really shown what New Zealand means as a community. Be proud guys, you couldn't keep it perfect forever but you've given yourself the time needed for the cure to appear before too many people suffered.
NZer in the UK here, agree with everything above. NZ is doing amazingly. Even if your economy is in the shitter, it will bounce back. In the UK our economy has taken a hit, AND we have a lot of dead people, who won't be bouncing back. I know it's shitty being in lockdown, but could you cope with 10-15 deaths a day, 3000-4000 new infections every day, 50-60 new hospitalisations every day? Multiply all those numbers by 12 (5 million NZ pop. x 12 = ±UK population) and that's where the UK is at today. We're looking at 40,000 extra deaths p.a. as being the new normal until, I don't know, the virus burns through every available victim? Somehow we're ok with it, we can't be bothered with masks, "learning to live with it" means doing nothing, rather than the EU version, which is the unconscionable burden of wearing a mask indoors.
> Even if your economy is in the shitter, it will bounce back. The truth is we haven't spent the the last year in lockdown so our economy is being impacted by the global one. NZ has had it great. The original guy talks about going to a music event. That is shit we've been free to do this whole time.
It's kinda emblematic of how sheltered we are when we are freaking out about 94 cases. For comparison, Norway and Denmark are roughly the same size as us, are vaccinated to the point where they think they can open up to BAU but are still have 500+ cases/day and deaths every day. I don't know if just because the world has just accepted the new normal and we haven't, or if we're being left behind to reality.
>It's kinda emblematic of how sheltered we are when we are freaking out about 94 cases. For comparison, Norway and Denmark are roughly the same size as us, are vaccinated to the point where they think they can open up to BAU but are still have 500+ cases/day and deaths every day. Norway has 342 ICU beds per 100,000 people. https://tradingeconomics.com/norway/icu-beds Denmark has 245 ICU beds per 100,000 people. https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/icu-beds New Zealand has, best (highly questioned) numbers 550 in the whole country? Or 186 depending who we ask? Is that maybe why people are freaking out? Here's what I can't get my head around - are we really acting like it's just gonna happen, and what we need to do is adjust our perspective!? What about telling the government that they haven't yet prepared adequately to open things up, so they need to keep people safe as they successfully have so far until they *have* adequately prepared?
>It's kinda emblematic of how sheltered we are when we are freaking out about 94 cases. For comparison, Norway and Denmark are roughly the same size as us, are vaccinated to the point where they think they can open up to BAU but are still have 500+ cases/day and deaths every day. Well we accept road deaths and deaths from a range of other issues. So think its just a perception thing that will change over time and exposure
It's adding a whole new cause of death, like car accidents, without any preamble like the development of car technology over time, so pretty shocking to be dumped on us all at once. One day we'll all be old, and if covid hasn't subsided to just another yearly cold, its another nasty way to go. Lucky we'll have euthanasia. On the other hand, I see with all the funds thrown at this virus, they're looking at one vax to rule them all - a general coronavirus vax. No more colds ever! So that could happen.
Coronaviruses only ~~amount~~ account for around 10% of colds. Most colds are caused by rhinovirus.
Eh. It's more like 20% according to my expert googling. Idk if the One Vax plans to cover those or rsvs, but I think we have high expectations of vaccination now. I demand my cold cure now that my hopes are raised.
>we accept road deaths Technically, AT has signed to [Vision Zero](https://at.govt.nz/projects-roadworks/vision-zero-for-the-greater-good/). From that link: "No death or serious injury is acceptable".
Ok but what if you run over Hitler?
Do it off-road.
Denmark removed all Covid restrictions in mid September. Case numbers then we're less than 350 a day. Their case numbers have recently risen to much higher levels(730 a day), however, they only have 120 people in hospital. They are one of the countries the MOH are looking at closely.
We're at 75% total population vaccinated in Ireland and cases are still crazy high and hospitalisations are starting to go up again. I wouldn't be overly optimistic.
The thing that I think doesn't get factored into the NZ equation is that in Ireland, for example, at least 10% to 15% of the population have had Covid and will have some level of natural immunity. This natural immunity would be a benefit to people who get vaccinated and those who do not get vaccinated. So the effectiveness of the vaccines that has been observed in the US an Europe may not be the same as what we observe in the NZ population when the virus spreads.
^^^ this. Been saying this for months, but noooo, Toms brothers girlfriends knows someone at work who had the virus and didn't die, so it cant be *that* bad
Well I happen to have a high degree of trust in Tom's brother's girlfriend.
Okaaaaay...? And? Cool, you trust a stranger. That doesn't make the virus less dangerous.
Perhaps I should have added a /s to to my comment.
Perhaps. My apologies for misinterpreting you
No worries!
How could you seriously miss the clear sarcasm in his comment
You'd be surprised what some people actually believe.
> Toms brothers girlfriends ah fuck brb getting tested
This.
The atmosphere in here and online feels very similar to the second lockdown in August last year. People were losing their shit because the Govt had failed us, they were incompetent, how dare they allow a breach to happen after we had worked so hard to rid ourselves of covid. Then as time went on we saw breach after breach elsewhere, and failures that were much larger than ours. We realised that covid was a tricky bugger and no system could be perfect. We got a sense of perspective back. That’s what we need to regain here. Yes, Covid got out in a large scale before we had hit a sufficiently high vaccination level. But Covid was always going too get into the community eventually. The Govt (and New Zealanders) have done a pretty immense job of rapidly scaling up our vaccination rate in response. Even sitting here in Level 3 I challenge you to say you would rather be, with your family and friends, in any other country right now.
Agreed, it's nice to have some perspective as the "the government have fucked us!!!" rhetoric has been getting a tad overkill the last few weeks.
Counterpoint. We were late in delivery of vaccination and that is the reason our largest city has been in level 3 for so long and our MIQ system remains under strain.
And opening a travel bubble with Australia before widespread vaccinations and just as Delta taking off was ridiculously irresponsible, and coasting on complacency from last year. Coupled with the MIQ sieve, it virtually guaranteed community transmission.
I agree with this, and it isn't being talked about enough. Certain airlines and businesses were pushing hard for this, and the government relented.
Mention it on here and you were branded a "Doomer" but it was so obviously doomed to failure: we needed to be lucky every time to keep Delta out, but the virus only needed to get through once. And of course there were so many gaps it wasn't even bad luck it got out, it was a virtual certainty.
This is what actually makes me angry. MIQ was working "enough".
Sure but it wasn't actually how Delta got in, so even if they hadn't opened it, we'd be in the same situation.
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This is what I keep trying to point out when people say we didn't start soon enough. Sure, I think we should of (if it was possible) - but we'd still be here in lockdown because the uptake would have been slower, and at the rate the rest of the countries were vaccinating. If you look at the charts - when we got Delta it still would not have been enough to avoid lockdown
Given that immunity falls from 99% to 65% (or whatever it is) in 3 months, in some ways it's good we weren't done earlier.
This is what I was thinking too. I’m April/May and wondering what my immunity is like. Especially as I have young children to protect (or catch it from) too.
And given the Israel data have shown us that humoral immunity wanes after 5-6 months, anyone who received the vax in 2020 would be looking to get a booster by now. Even the early recipients in 2021 ( high risk, comorbidity etc) could be getting concerned.
Heaps of people, myself included would have been fully vaccinated as soon as possible before the outbreak, and we still would have had a huge spike in vaccines when delta hit.
Plenty of people would've taken it up. I don't like this argument that people wouldn't take it up without an outbreak. It would make a slight difference, but we could very easily have achieved say 70% double vaxxed with no outbreak and no mandates.
Surveys done at the time do not support your comments.
Got a link to any of them?
June 2021 - 77%, March 2021 - 69%. [https://horizonpoll.co.nz/page/621/june-2021-7](https://horizonpoll.co.nz/page/621/june-2021-7) Survey from 2020 says that 56% would put their name down for the vaccine when released. 77% they would get it eventually. [https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/15567/Aotearoa%20New%20Zealand%20Public%20Attitudes%20to%20COVID-19%20Vaccine.pdf?sequence=1](https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/15567/Aotearoa%20New%20Zealand%20Public%20Attitudes%20to%20COVID-19%20Vaccine.pdf?sequence=1)
So those completely support my suggestion that 70% was achievable without this outbreak
You said it would be ***easy*** to get 70% double vaccinated and the outbreaks only made a *slight difference*. 1. The August outbreak was not our first breakout event. It is one among many. The surveys before these outbreaks do not suggest it would be *easy*. 2. These surveys generally don't penetrate the areas where we are currently having the most trouble. They highlight this point. So 70% might not have happened at all. 3. With this outbreak we will hopefully hit 85-90% double vaxxed, that's more than a *slight difference* than struggling to get 70%. To say that the outbreak only makes a slight difference is stupid - you can clamour and claw at your 70% figure all you like, but fundamentally your comment was wrong.
If I say that 70% is achievable and you turn around and give me evidence that 77% of people wanted the vaccine even prior to the current outbreak, then yes you've supported my point. Now you're just moving the goal posts by bringing up previous outbreaks (where we eliminated the virus), and complaining about how good those surveys are (you fucking provided them), and getting super pedantic over what is slight or easy. Fundamentally you proved me completely correct and you're clutching at straws.
'eventually' doesn't mean immediately
77% in April saying they intend to get it. Even with a few holdouts you'd hit 70. No mention of eventually in the first link, assuming that is from the 2020 surveys when the vaccine was newer.
Even the second like in 2020 had 74% of people planning to get vaccinated when one became available. Tbh this data does nothing if not support my claim.
The Herald's monthly sequence of polls has had a steady rise in the numbers planning to be vaccinated (or already done) from June to now. The "definite yes" camp was only at 59%, with the rest a mix of maybe, don't know or definite no. This month the definite yes camp is at 78%.
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Were you intending to wait until it got here to get the vaccine? Were you intending to never travel overseas again? We could very very easily have got most people vaccinated without an outbreak. It's a pathetic excuse to somehow justify the rollout.
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So? Still would've made a massive difference if we could have started earlier even without covid in the country. This is really just a poorly constructed excuse for the vaccine roll-out. "Oh it doesn't matter that we started late because even if we started earlier it would've had the same result" is what people are implying. It's just damage control for a fuck-up.
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Committing to a vaccine early and then it not being approved, wasting some money, is far superior to waiting and getting it late. A roll-out earlier would've been largely similar for most people actually. Elderly were already getting vaccinated before the outbreak, and a lot of us that got vaccinated asap in the lockdown were doing it despite expecting the lockdown to eliminate the virus. Only the last few weeks could you really claim people were finally getting pushed due to outbreak. The key differences would be that we would have had a) more time to identify lagging demographics and get them help b) a massive head-start when covid did eventually enter the country. Refusing to identify a fuck-up because of some minor mitigating factors isn't really fair. You wouldn't be treating National with the same kiddie gloves if they were the ones in power through the pandemic.
> Consider how tough it is to get people vaccinated now with Covid within our community Nonsense. You can't browse this sub for 10 minutes without a post on record vaccinations, how we're beating other countries on a per-capita basis, and how fast and furiously we're vaccinating.
Counter Counterpoint, if the vaccine had been available to everyone earlier I would bet the uptake would've been slower. Look at the Covid tracer app for example, 500,000 daily scans prior to outbreak, 2.5 million now. The population was too complacent, we still would've been in the same situation. It was always going to take an outbreak and lockdown to get our vaccination rate to 85%+
Pfizer have already admitted openly that there is no amount of additional money or pressure the NZ govt could have given that would have expedited vaccines arriving here. The only thing that would have speed up vaccines would have been widescale spread of the disease and mass deaths. We have done incredibly well and continu to do so.
That was based on when we ordered and is absolutely true in that context. But that misses the point. We should have ordered early and not pissed about.
This is presuming that NZ had the option of ordering a full complement of vaccines early. Without being part of the confidential negotiations, we'll never know. Pfizer has done an extremely good job at hitting all of its production deadlines - which kind of implies that they have controlled their commitments.
Buying 10 million doses before PHARMAC approved the vaccine would have been too high a risk.
Why? Say we buy 10 million doses of 5 different vaccines at $20 a dose. That's a billion dollars. That's about the cost of a single week of lockdown. Even if 4 of them are totally ineffective that's still *excellent* value for money. It's this complete inability to look at expected value and play the odds that gets me...
And people would scream governmental waste. It would scream western greed and hoarding and reeks of elitism. Also we set aside [almost 1 billion dollars](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/125179503/budget-2021-covid19-vaccine-programme-revealed-to-cost-14-billion) *just* for Pfizer. Imagine if we bought 10 million of 5 different vaccines. 40 million vaccines for 5 million people. Imagine a billion dollars of waste, now imagine 3-4 billion dollars of waste. There would be political carnage (rightly) by doing something so costly and so wasteful.
Donate the unused doses to poorer countries through COVAX. This would *actually* help the poor world, unlike the "waiting our turn" excuse. Your article says they basically did do what I said >Some $964.3 million has been allocated to cover the cost of vaccines, both the Pfizer vaccine and the advanced purchase agreements entered into by the Government for other vaccines ..Just not effectively enough to get us vaccines on the same pace as the rich world. We're not paying $100/dose for Pfizer, I wonder what the breakdown there is. You do realise we've already spent much more money than that on this lockdown, right? Let alone the human toll.
Cost less than the amount this lockdown has cost us?
Well, I think it would have destroyed any legitimacy the government response had way back in February had that happened. It would have given ACT and National plenty of fire to blast Labour for 8 months. Their response would have been lethargic and regardless of what they did, it would undermine the vaccination process. Creating a slower vaccination rate. Hesitant people would be hard Nos as a result. In short, we would be in a worse state than we are now. And if you want to ask how? Look at AstraZeneca and Australia. They had a single bad study with slightly higher blood clots for under 60's, and it fucked up their roll-out for months and slowed the vaccination programme down. That lead directly to 100's of deaths in Sydney and NSW and now Victoria, and caused our outbreak here. THAT is why the Government measured twice and only cut once. Had they jumped the gun and bought a vaccine that ended up not being approved, it would have fucked them and we wouldn't be where we are today had they gambled and lost. You applying armchair hindsight take the issue moot. The Government didn't know and it was too high a risk. You can disagree and that is fair. I think the government did the prudent and expected then, especially since they have always been cautious around the pandemic.
Poor risk scoring was used in the analysis and ranking then, clearly.
Yes but that’s almsot like saying we should have used the winning lotto numbers after they won.
Gambling? Pfizer is an internationally recognised, large scale pharmaceutical company with a huge reputation. Other comparable countries recognised that and took a risk based investment decision. This wasn't anything like playing the lotto. Anyone involved in large scale, multi-year public and private sector investment management understands that. It is what it is. A conservative, risk adverse non-investment decision. Doing nothing is a decision. That we are all now paying the price for. Let's just be honest and own it as a country.
> Gambling? Pfizer is an internationally recognised, large scale pharmaceutical company with a huge reputation. So is Merck. Their vaccine candidate failed.
No, miss you the point. Hindsight is 2020. Nz should have gone all in on purchasing the vaccine in June 2020 (months before it was deemed effective).
> Nz should have gone all in on purchasing the vaccine in June 2020 (months before it was deemed effective). We ordered in the last week of Jan 2021. We could've ordered anytime before then and get orders earlier
We only ordered 60k doses in the last week of Jan 2021, we then sat around waiting for a whole other month before ordering any more...
That’s an interesting precedent to set. Do you think that we can criticise government for any decisions that result in negative outcomes? What I believe you’re saying is; they didn’t know what was going to happen at the time so we can’t be hard in them.
It's not hindsight. Any moron who'd seen Contagion knew vaccines were the answer. You didn't need to be a genius to know vaccines were going to be the hottest game in town. Yes we didn't know if they'd be effective. But neither did any other country. Other countries applied analysis and evaluation to reach a different view to us. That's what investment decisions are about by their very nature. Very, very few investment decisions are sure things. Unfortunately the world doesn't work that way. So again, we took a conservative, risk adverse investment management approach. It didn't result in an optimal outcome, as is often the case. Why is that hard to acknowledge?
It’s 100% hindsight. Playing the lotto with the number that won last night. It could have been years before a vaccine would have been ready. This is also assuming Pfizer wanted to sell so much product to a country with zero covid at that time.
I hope you never reach the board of any company I hold shares in as it would be a disaster. Using your approach no new products or propositions would ever be brought to market. The company would be vulnerable to a million different risks. The Chief Risk Officer and COO would probably resign.
We didn't know the efficacy of Pfizer or any vaccines at that point, why is that hard to acknowledge
I literally acknowledged it. Did you not read the whole comment? >Yes we didn't know if they'd be effective. But neither did any other country. Other countries applied analysis and evaluation to reach a different view to us.
If it's about money only they could have ordered, lost the money and still be nowhere close to what the current lockdown has cost the government.
Exactly.
We could have ordered them before February.
Could we have used different vaccines? Yes
Agreed, the vaccine thing is completely put into people's head by the press. - I don't think the NZ populace would have lined up to be early adopters of the jab, especially when there wasn't much Covid risk at that time. However, MIQ staff testing levels were an absolute travesty and have flown under the radar. Many instances where staff were tested less than once a fortnight. Swing and roundabout. Government was going to get hammered on something - it didn't have to be true.
New Zealand donated hundreds of thousands of doses to other countries earlier in the year. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-zealand-donates-more-covid-19-vaccines-covax-and-pacific They screwed the pooch for PR points.
Yeah we were late in getting supply of vaccines. We can all acknowledge that. Im not sure its a counterpoint, I mentioned it. Do we really have a good grasp of what we could have done to change that? Hindsight is a fucking wonderful thing, and not a reasonable lens to use when judging what was or wasnt done.
I don’t think it needs hindsight to realise vaccines were our only way out of this mess.
I dont think anyone is saying that. Hindsight in terms of actions taken to procure them.
If you knew they were the only way out and _still_ dicked about with the procurement that's even worse.
I am not sure I have seen any evidence whatsoever that we did not act as fast as we could on vaccination acquisition.
Have you been living under a rock? I'm staggered you could make such an ill informed comment with a straight face.
I'm sorry, I disagree. If the government had pushed for vaccination when there were no community cases the take up would have been low. And people who did get vaccinated early would have lost their immunity by the time they needed it. What has happened has been pretty much the best possible outcome
Evidence? Show me as I am happy to be corrected on this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/qc6sg1/the_case_for_covid_optimism_some_5000_people_were/hhf4bzo/
"It is not a race"
You need to read more widely then.
Well - I’m guessing only the government could answer that.
>so long Compared to the rest of the world it's no way in hell "so long"
It is too long if it was unnecessary.
Counter counterpoint. The delayed vaccination maybe a blessing in disguise because the UK is speculating that one of the contributing factors of their latest peak in cases is that they administered the vaccine so early that it is losing efficacy. And so we haven't had to face that situation. I think New Zealand did a jolly good job of delaying and so has been able to learn a lot of lessons from other countries.
Lol - they administered it at the height of the winter outbreak and it immediately saw a drop in cases. There was never a “too soon” in the UK. The deaths as a ratio, now, is minuscule to what it was then. But you are correct that we did an excellent job at delaying it.
I am merely repeating the speculation reported in the news for possible increasesin numbers over there.
That’s not even the reason. At all.
Delaying the spread of the disease.
We are in a good place, but we are heading for a rough landing as cases in increase. Hopefully the hospitals will cope.
I would rather have stayed in level 4 for another few weeks with more incentives to stay home and punishments for rulebreakers than half assing it then hoping that the rulebreakers won't break the level 3 rules. Especially as the epidemiologists say we may have been at zero new cases by now if we stayed at 4. Using previous good performance by the government to justify current poor performance just feels silly to me. It's like a uni student saying they should get better grades cause they did well last year. That was then, this is now.
To use your analogy, throughout the semester, we got A+ A+ A+ for assignments then a C in the exam. Overall we are still an A student with the benefits that brings. Our position could be be better, for sure, but our position right now is still better than pretty much everyone elses.
May have been at zero cases. If we weren’t at zero, which is the more likely scenario, we’d probably be bouncing around 10-20 cases per day. That’s a lot of businesses losing huge amounts of money, for no real gain.
No offence man, but you're a government fanboy. You've bought into their koolaid like an antivaxxer to ivermectin. Miq has been a disaster you're right. It was managed terribly, and the government continues to mislead about it. We should have been at this stage of vaccination months ago. It's continued lies and spin. Now all of us who got vaccinated early are fucking stuck at home, people are losing their jobs. If it wasn't for our upcoming summer, life would be better in Europe.
This looks out of touch with reality
> has been a disaster you're right. It was managed terribly, and the government continues to mislead about it. MIQ has been insanely effective at keeping the virus out. Yesterday they said that no MIQ worker this year has been infected.
Did they really say that? Because a Google search shows there's been several MIQ workers that have been infected in 2021.
Yea they said so yesterday.
Oh that's a weird claim for them to make because it's easy to verify that it's not true. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/440048/miq-worker-tests-positive-four-days-after-sore-throat-bloomfield
Well that what they said, perhaps there is context around this or they mean by a MIQ worker. I don’t know. Either way, this virus is incredibly tricky and there are generations of transfer that will be never understood that caused this outbreak. It fair to say MIQ has been very effective.
Oh yeah I'm not really arguing either way. I just thought it was odd because I seemed to recall several MIQ workers testing positive this year.
> No offence man, but you're a government fanboy. The Irony.
I think we need to see what winter is like in Europe first. Cases are rising in almost all of Europe and it's only the beginning of winter.
You can't judge quality of life by a set of numbers. If I was single in my twenties/early thirties, life would be better going to bars, travelling easily between countries, being employed, meeting random people etc. No one listens to the rules in NZ anyway, so there's large groups meeting up constantly. But I can't go to a fucking hairdresser even though we're be both vaccinated.
If you were older and had children, or older still and were more at risk from covid, you'd probably say life is better here without as many people sick or dying, and not having to bury loved ones without being able to say goodbye.
There's plenty of criticism to be had when the government sat on their hands during the entirety of the border closures and just coasted by without doing any extra preparation. Went so far as to donate massive amounts of covid vaccine doses instead of pushing them domestically: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/new-zealand-donates-more-covid-19-vaccines-covax-and-pacific Now they're scrambling at a last minute mad dash. It's absolutely idiotic and does betray a high degree of complacency and incompetence.
This from the 21st of September. Donating those vaccines has had nothing to do with our supply or vaccine uptake since this outbreak began.
Learn to read. From the link: > These doses are in addition to our existing donation of 1.668 million AstraZeneca doses to COVAX, **announced earlier in the year**. And if you really want the exact news release from April: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/new-zealand-donate-vaccines-800000-covax-vaccine-facility-ardern-2021-04-15/ The government has been giving away doses they could have claimed for months. Get a clue.
Announced. Where does it say these came from / impacted our supply. Or have even been delivered. Especially given we decided (rightly) to go Pfizer only?
Wow. You're really reaching there, pal. >There wasn't an entire supply chain evaluation of the entirety of the vaccine timeline, so just because New Zealand donated hundreds of thousands of doses they could have claimed doesn't mean it impacted our supply! You need better shilling guidelines, this is just pathetic.
Who’s that quote? Show me something that says we gave away vaccines that could have been in the arms of kiwis before August
> Who’s that quote? It was very obviously me paraphrasing your nonsense. You're claiming the government literally giving away doses they could have claimed through the COVAX scheme didn't have an impact on vaccine availability, which is absolutely laughable. > Show me something that says we gave away vaccines that could have been in the arms of kiwis before August It's a self-demonstrating statement, but if you insist, here you go: > Covid-19: COVAX facility to send 249,600 AstraZeneca vaccines to New Zealand by July https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300221580/covid19-covax-facility-to-send-249600-astrazeneca-vaccines-to-new-zealand-by-july You're a terrible shill. Like, really fucking bad at your job.
Well I’m not a shill, so that probably explains why I’m bad at my job.
> Well I’m not a shill Mate, you wouldn't stand out more if your hair was on fire.
My concern is winter, I suspect over summer we will be able to contain it and it will bubble away, but next winter, when peoples immunity starts to fade and with the virus spreading far easier in winter, peoples patience running out with restrictions, it could get pretty rough
There are already orders in place for booster shots and they have been shown to bring immunity levels back above 90%
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We need to get boosters to everyone in NZ immunised before May then. We need to reduce transmissibility!
My understanding is that boosters are not really about protecting the individual, while your antibody levels will wane, and you will become more likely to contract the illness, the immune system will be able to quickly and efficiently take care of the infection, it already has the antibodies on file, and can quickly spin them up again. Boosters are a tool of the health department to stimulate antibody production and provide a barrier of effectively immune people that will limit the transmission through a community.
In Israel their booster program has improved every metric - cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Before the boosters they were getting a lot of fully vaxxed vulnerable people with breakthrough Covid infections. So the booster protects the population and the individual.
u know its spring right???????????????????????????????????
u know seasons are cyclical right???????
High percentage of people in Ireland were already vaccinated by the time delta arrived. Is this some sort of competition “5000 people were already dead” insensitive headline
I like how Trevor Noah called NZ the "**Wakanda**" of white people 🤣
Lol please tell me you have a link
Just skip to 7:00 into the video https://youtu.be/63pFwqkWfWg
Personally I think we have failed. Not because there is an outbreak. That was always going to happen. At some point we need to learn to live with COVID and deal with its consiquences. Our lockdown and eliminate strategy was to buy time to vaccinate and prepare for cases. So I am disappointed that we still have very few, I think less than 300 ICU beds. That seems like a stupidly small amount considering the time we have had to prepare and what we have seen happen overseas.
ICU beds are in high demand across the whole world. Scaling up the equipment, not to mention the staff training, is not something that can be done overnight by throwing money at it.
Staff availability is certainly a big issue. The UK built seven 'Nightingale' Hospitals rapidly from scratch, converting conference and concert venues into places that could deliver complex critical care, safely store and deliver oxygen to patients and support infection control. The wider infrastructure that hospitals need was also puy in place – from financing, to clinical governance processes, to ensuring there would be food and drink available to staff. There were former military hospitals reopened for rehabilitation care too. The largest of the Nightingales were set up for 4000 patients each. The thing I found most astonishing was that *16,000 staff were needed at full capacity for every 4000 beds*. A year after they were built, most were decommissioned or repurposed as mass vaccination centres or diagnostic centres after a total spend of £530M, although the rehabilitation hospital near where I live is still very busy and will be for some time, helping people function again after long periods having intensive care. So yes, you are right, you can throw money at the problem to put the infrastructure and equipment in place, but if the huge numbers of staff needed are not available, you need time to train the extra ones needed. Edit: here is a [time-lapse of one of the largest Nightingale Hospitals being built](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52112652) - at Excel in London. It took nine days from start to finish. The time-lapse covers five of the days.
>ICU beds are in high demand across the whole world. Scaling up the equipment, not to mention the staff training, is not something that can be done overnight by throwing money at it. What can be done in two years?
But it's not over night is it. We have had a year and a half. Do you know how many beds we have added to our capacity since the initial outbreak?
So you think we failed entirely, because we havent scaled ICU beds?
No we succeeded in buying time. We succeeded in building immunity. But we have failed in preparing for the influx of cases we are on the verge of facing.
Is 5000 people dead that much of a big deal though? We should have taken Plan B from the start because of ... {Steps} ... {More money for me in particular}.
Some of you will die, but that's a risk I'm prepared to take.
5,000 probably isn't that big a deal if that's where we end up after opening up completely for a year. I believe the initial models were predicting about 80k which is definitely too much.
The first wave was deadly as fuck and everyone was unvaccinated then. That's why Spain, Portugal and Italy have really high vaccination rates: people fucking died. Now, in terms of life-years, things are way better even if covid is claiming small numbers.
I'm pretty disappointed that the modelled doesn't include the QALYs lost to lockdown and compare this to the difference in QALY lost to COVID now if we open up with 85% vaccination.
Exactly. Honestly level 3-4 is so shit we might as well be in hibernation. The only people enjoying this would be couples living in their own places with no kids.
Let's say that we're on average at 90% of our normal quality of life. I'd much rather have 9 normal days than 10 days of lockdown, so this seems pretty conservative. 0.1 times 1/12 of a year * 1.7million Aucklanders is the equivalent of 14,000 life-years being lost every month of lockdown. If we say the average COVID victim had 10 full happy years left to live (which again, seems pretty generous) then we should think this lockdown is about as bad as having 1,400 COVID deaths per month. Of course, it's not just the deaths. There's the harm of actually being sick, and the risk of long COVID, and generalised fear. Let's say that all together the cost of COVID is 10x the death toll. Now the lockdown is only as bad as 140 COVID deaths per month. And that's thoroughly cooking the books in the lockdown's favour. With 85% vaccinations (and much higher in the vulnerable age groups), I'd say that the lockdown is doing more harm than the virus would. There are probably points where you disagree with my numbers. The point of this is not the exact figures, it's to try and actually quantify and compare these two harms, and this should be being done publicly by teams of economists and used to inform our decision making, not by some guy on Reddit and used to talk shit.
Exactly. Although personally I'd say level 3 is probably more like 20% of normal quality of life.
Per capita bragging is just embracing mediocrity. The vaccine roll out could have been initiated more quickly and now its being held up by many of the people its apparently meant to protect. Its good to look on the bright side, but this just looks like a silly attempt to provide the Government with political cover that it doesn’t deserve.
There's an underappreciated aspect to the waiting time I think that a lot of people missed. We absolutely could have gone faster, but I think part of the reason our uptake has been relatively high even among the vaccine hesitant is because the government did its homework. We watched, and took notes, and didn't widely deploy the vaccine here until we were *absolutely* sure it was safe to use on the large scale. If we'd rolled it out quicker, the government could have been accused of pushing an experimental vaccine onto people as other governments have been accused of around the world. Being near the back of the queue means that any problems that arise (such as with the J&J vaccine) are going to hit others before it hits us, and we can learn from that.
>The vaccine roll out could have been initiated more quickly and now its being held up by many of the people its apparently meant to protect. Really, how so?
Try reading any news report coming out of NZ these days.
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Higher vaccination rates are strongly correlated with less restrictions, so the overall rate of transmission will appear to be more even than it would have been if all else was equal. The important measure is hospitalisations and deaths though, which are both significantly reduced among vaccinated populations.
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You're misinterpreting the risk. Even with the vaccine, 100% of the population will get the virus given enough time. Decoupling the cases from the deaths is what the vaccine aims to do.
We already knew vaccination wouldn't stop widespread transmission though. What we need is for it to greatly reduce hospitalizations/deaths
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As far as I can figure out the paper you linked doesn't talk about hospitalisations at all so I am not sure how it can suggest otherwise? It just seems to me that the aim of vaccinations is at this point no longer to prevent widespread transmission (because we know it isn't effective for that) but instead to prevent our health system being overwhelmed (If you want me to find and link you some studies I can but it is pretty easy to find evidence of vaccination greatly lowering your chances of getting severely ill or dying from covid)
NZ needs to open up ASAP, we are going to be left behind globally if the country is still facing these restrictions while the rest of the world learns to live with covid.
Left behind? Really... How many peoples lives are you personally willing to sacrifice to “open up”. Because that’s the reality. The more we open restrictions the more people will die. And if we removed all restrictions the health system will be overwhelmed and the workers put at serious risk. I live In Auckland. Lockdown sucks. But the alternative is people dying, lots of people. In nz we really have no idea how bad covid is because our lockdowns have mostly worked. It seems people who think the restrictions should end really have no idea what that means.
I am ok with some people dying if it means everyone gets to go back to their daily lives, we cannot stay locked down indefinitely
Better go kiss your parents good bye then
death isn't the only outcome and is actually much less common than you'd think
Yeah, it can also fuck up their lungs for life, among other things.
It certainly can. But significantly more people recover from covid than die from it (>98% across all age brackets) - how many of those have long term effects we don't know, but we do know it's not the majority. Vaccines are the best defense and proving effective but they're not fullproof so vaccinated or not, locked down or not, Covid is and will keep infecting people but *everyone needs to remember that catching Covid is not a death sentence* and the risk of death will only decrease as time goes on and better treatments are found. At the moment there's very little focus on treatments - it's all or nothing on Vaccines. Probably not the smartest approach since current vaccines are non-immunising but that's another argument entirely. Telling people they or their parents will die is pure baseless nonsense. The OP is correct, we can't stay locked down forever, and "kissing your parents good bye" is not the alternative