Originally Posted by
Mark Le Comte
Living in New Zealand, I can say we pretty much shut down the COVID outbreak here with about 7 weeks of lockdown (5 1/2 weeks very strict, and 2 1/2 weeks still pretty strict). Remember also this was in a small country of about 5 million, with only one city of over 1 million. I think the official statistics have us at under 2000 total cases and 21 deaths (mostly from a retirement village) , with about 40 active cases remaining.
But what happens next? How long do we keep borders closed? Are we at risk of another outbreak (and shutdown) from importing cases? Could we have eased lockdown earlier (e.g. my region has not had a new case in about 4 weeks but we were still locked down with the rest of country)?
Even though our 'go hard, go early' approach worked well from a public health perspective, was it the right thing to after considering all economic (and potential legal) issues. I don't think anyone has the hard data to prove that for sure yet.