It’s still too soon to tell but it seems like the economic impact of a thorough lockdown (New Zealand) isn’t much greater than most people staying home voluntarily (Sweden). The difference seems worth it to control the pandemic. Two weeks from now it looks like New Zealand (with zero cases left) with have fewer restrictions than Sweden.
New Zealand is an island. It knew that it could pursue the full eradication option because it had few cases and could fully close its borders. European countries with their large numbers of infected and more porous borders (economy requiring movement of migrant workers for agriculture, etc.) never pursued full eradication, only curve-flattening.
You do not even have to close borders long-term to be a success story. Croatia (an EU country) shares both land and maritime borders with Italy, and a lot of Italians have property in Croatia that they go to on the weekend. So far, there have been 103 deaths and 2,246 cases, with a population of 1.4 million.
Croatia has not had a single case of COVID-19 for 3 days in a row [1], and has been allowing citizens of several European countries, including ones like Germany, come there [2], since mid-May.
This stuff is not rocket science, and while Croatia will not completely eradicate COVID-19, which is unfortunate, it still is impressive.
While it's admirable, Croatia has 2 / 3 times less density of population than Italy. Lombardy alone has twice the population of the whole Croatia and 6 times it's density of population. It's hard to make comparisons
The comparison is not between Croatia and Italy, but between Croatia and Sweden. In the case of Sweden, it has approximately 1/3 of the population density of Croatia.
The fact that Sweden does not have a coronavirus hotspot as a neighbour further indicates that the Croatian outcomes have been much better.
Sweden has a low population density yes, but that's irrelevant - most is unpopulated land, which doesn't have an effect. If you count Greenland when measuring the population density of Denmark, it's super low, but that would be ridiculous.
More relevant measures would be things like urbanization, where Sweden is number 23 in the world and Croatia number 104 (by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country). Or, perhaps, the population density of the most dense areas (5,200/km2 for Stockholm, 4,055/km2 for Zagreb). These are just examples of possible metrics, of course there are many more which might be more relevant, but population density of the entire country has no relevance at all.
"it has approximately 1/3 of the population density of Croatia"
Not really. Sweden has a low population density (23/km²) because most of the country has no one living there. The Stockholm region, where the spread of the virus has been the highest, has a population density of 5200/km².
Few people might be walking on foot to Sweden (though in Tornio/Haparanda, some do walk over the border), but Sweden has land borders with two countries and a bridge to a third. Traffic has continued to move over those border crossings during the time of the pandemic. In fact, there has been a steady flow of traffic over most European border crossings along major motorways, though that traffic has consisted of only drivers and passengers who could show they are moving around for work purposes etc.
The only common way into New Zealand is a flight or an occasional ship. NZ has no immediately neighboring countries that it runs freight trucks to and from day in and day out, and it doesn't need to move large numbers of agricultural workers around internationally. Therefore, for New Zealand traffic is obviously going to be smaller and easier to control than European countries.
That article says 14,000 workers/year from just the Pacific. Not sure of the total, and it's probably not large by European standards.
Our borders have been very effectively closed the last few weeks though. The fact that 56 Avatar film crew people have just been let in (on a chartered flight, after testing negative, and now spending 14 days in quarantine) has been quite contentious: https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington/121681...
Do we have a good understanding of what the economic impact was in New Zealand? I can't find any unemployment numbers - they haven't released anything since March, before the pandemic took hold. But Sweden's unemployment rate of 7.9% and rising (from the article) is still much lower than the current US numbers - around 20% [1].
How quickly people are unemployed varies. In the US you might be able to fire someone on the day, but in Sweden or Germany it might take 1-6 months from that you give notice until you can stop paying them and they are officially unemployed.
New Zealand is not comparable to any other country really - the geographical location, isolation, culture and way of living etc makes it ideal case for a lockdown based approach.
It is not feasible to lock down Brazil or Mexico - more people would die because of the lockdown.
As for the Swedish approach - the rest of the world hates it primarly because long term it might just prove that the lockdowns were both ineffectual and unnecessary perhaps even more damaging.
Countries quite different to NZ achieved (near) elimination with a lockdown approach. Vietnam, for example. Other countries have been successful without a lockdown, e.g. South Korea. There's more than one way to beat this virus. New Zealand even made some big mistakes to this day --- not encouraging mask wearing, not testing people in quarantine --- and still pulled it off. Beating COVID19 is not easy but it's not crazy hard and you don't have to be an island fortress. Seems to me there's a lot of special pleading going on to rationalize failures of leadership and execution.
OTOH I agree that lockdowns in many countries have been very poorly done. In particular, a lot of countries have used lockdowns as a delaying tactic with no clear strategy for eliminating the virus or avoiding endless cycles of infection and lockdown --- certainly no clearly communicated strategy. In those cases, indeed a relaxed lockdown with more infection might be better in the long term.
> the rest of the world hates it primarly because long term it might just prove that the lockdowns were both ineffectual and unnecessary perhaps even more damaging.
This is already what it's looking like when comparing across states in the US.
What I do not see anyone talking about is the economic and social effects of having closed borders for 1.5+ years (until the population is sufficiently vaccinated).
NZ's tourism industry is a large chunk of their GDP and will be reduced significantly until borders are open again. Re-opening borders after elimination is political suicide as all you need is one person to start the whole thing again.
NZ tourist spending was 60% domestic pre-COVID. A lot of outbound tourism also happens that will be going domestic now. We also expect to have a "travel bubble" with Australia and possibly other countries where COVID is effectively eliminated --- Australia was 50% of international visitors pre-COVID.
Other affected industries are international students and TV/film production. We will be admitting people for those with at least a 14-day quarantine and testing. That's not much fun but if you're a student or a media producer NZ looks like a particularly good destination at this time.
All assuming we can keep COVID down, of course, which we shouldn't take for granted.
Yeah, our economy's going to hurt, but countries wracked by ongoing COVID and various levels of lockdown for the forseeable future will suffer worse.
I don't think there's any information on how long level 1 would last. I am just wondering what the strategy on borders would be if you are going for elimination.
Surely once you have opened the borders it is only a matter of time for a new case to be imported (if you look at NSW right now, we've had a week of no local transmission but near-daily new cases for returned travellers, who are luckily in forced quarantine).
You could force-quarantine everyone for 14 days but I would not call that an 'open' border and it wouldn't do much to help the tourism industry.
> near-daily new cases for returned travellers, who are luckily in forced quarantine
How do you do that though? People arrive at the airport and take a taxi or train to a hotel? Thst's how a lot of the early spread started in Sweden: tourists returned from skiing in the italian alps in the last week of February, and infected taxi drivers.
I am not quite sure how the transport works here (Australia) but it's most definitely not a random taxi.
The hotels are paid for and organised by the government and are guarded to ensure no one goes in/leaves, so I assume the transport to the hotels is also tightly monitored and the safety of drivers is ensured.
I believe China has similar procedures.
Before the hotels we had self-quarantine and that actually caused an Uber driver to become infected when he drove a cruise ship passenger home.
Once the number of cases falls below a certain level it becomes feasible to test every visitor, contact-trace every infection, and only quarantine the people who need it.
This is a strategy that has worked well to fight other communicable diseases for which there is no vaccine.
