The population density in New Zealand is very low - 46 people per square mile. In the past 7 days - the number of infected people has doubled. This population density is about the same as Kansas (the first US state I checked for close proximity on this metric, 52.9 people per square mile) - for comparison. New Zealand has roughly 4.7 million people. Kansas has roughly 2.9 million people. Kansas has (at this time) 900 confirmed cases. New Zealand's rate of infection is right around 190 infected per million people. Kansas' rate is 313 per million people - but a huge majority of cases are in just a few high population counties - with the huge majority of counties in Kansas with zero or extremely low rates of infection. Did Kansas do anything special? Did they do something that the rest of the world should look at and say - we need to do what Kansas is doing? No, the reality is not so simply as this article alludes!
New Zealand gets right around 4 million visitors per year (noting that they are an island nation - perhaps to comparison to Hawaii would make better sense?). Kansas gets 25 million tourists per year - noting that Kansas is a land-locked state. New Zealand get's 450,000 Chinese visitors per year - the number for Kansas is unknown to me based on a quick search of Chinese visitors to Kansas - but my son lives in Kansas City Missouri - there are a good number of Chinese people visiting and/or working there - including many that work with Visa's at his tech company employers.
What we really know about the spread of Covid-19! That outside of China - the spread has largely been dictated by global travel. New Zealand announced it would close it's borders from international travel - China specifically on February 2nd (2 days after the US did!). This, both from New Zealand's perspective and the US perspective, was the greatest step that could be taken to minimize infections - blocking entry from those who recently traveled to or reside in the high infection areas.
New Zealand has only 1 city of over 1 million people (1.45 million specifically) and 7 cities total of over 100,000 people. When compared to similar sized cities and areas in the USA - New Zealand ceases being a standout in the fight against the corona virus. Are the results in New Zealand a result of nothing more than a combination of it's much more closed society from outsiders (an island nation)? Is it nothing more than just a result of it's incredible low population density? Or is there truly a correlation between their actions taken and the end result? Over the past week, New Zealand's rate of increase has been 100% (doubling in one week). This is nearly identical to the rate of infection increase in the USA over the same past week. So this shows simply that the rate of increased infections in New Zealand is literally matching that of the USA - so wouldn't it be just as fair to say that the USA is doing just as good (or just as bad) of a job as New Zealand is?
Of course, no country in the world is testing their entire population - anywhere! Every single country in the world is suffering from not having enough test kits to administer them to everybody and are therefore relegating tests to symptomatic people and those who have been in close proximity to known infected people.
New Zealand is always going to have fewer total infections and deaths versus the US - after all our population is 75 times larger than New Zealand's. And to add to that, the areas where the US is seeing the largest outbreaks or hotspots, is also in areas of FAR higher population densities.
Remember, China's rate of infection at their peak rate was between a 1.4 to 1.5 day over day rate of increase (this may have been contributed by their lack of initial testing and large backlog of patients needing testing). This correlates with a weekly increase of 10 fold the number of infections. Ie. increasing from 10 to 100, or from 100 to 1,000 or from 1,000 to 10,000 over the course of 7 days. The US has not seen this rate of increase in infections or deaths anywhere (yet). We are much more in high infection areas, likely to see day over day increase rates of 1.15 to 1.25. Of course, like China, the rate of day over day increase is closely tied to the number of people tested . . . and just like in China, testing starts out more gradual. China largely used the WHO tests, which proved to be faulty - lots of false negatives as it turned out.
Of course, taking or reading much data from China is HIGHLY risky. China's numbers simply cannot be trusted. A perfect example of this is to read and understand how China has handled the 2018 and 2019 Swine/Pig virus and how they purposely hid those numbers as well. Simply Google: "Reuters Coronavirus Pigs" to get an idea of the efforts China makes to hide the truth from the public and the world - in recent/current times (not decades ago).
So are we rightfully giving credit to New Zealand from actions that they have taken and proven to be successful - is there really any causal relationship between their actions and the results? Or are we giving credit to New Zealand for a coincidental outcome that is not based on their actions, but more so based on their population, location, and circumstances that are largely unrelated to the actions that they have put in place?
We can certainly look to New York vs. California for a comparison in how quickly "shelter-in-place" orders played out. Parts of CA that were showing higher infection rates issued localized shelter-in-place orders pretty early - and their cases never spread at such an uncontrollable rate. Whereas in New York and NY City specifically, I think half the country was thinking to themselves and their family - why isn't NYC in lockdown? Then a few days later, the NYC Mayor (De Blasio) started pushing the idea and suggesting that NYC do exactly that! But the Governor (Cuomo) was opposed to locking down NYC. For days the Mayor pushed the idea, for days and days the NY Governor (Cuomo) fought and criticized the idea. Only after the spread had become so obviously expansive, did Cuomo finally agree to locking down NYC! From the day De Blasio started recommending the city-wide lockdown to the day Cuomo confinely capitulated and allowed the "shelter-in-place" order to go into effect - ended up knowingly and statistically costing the city a huge increase in spread - which when all is said and done will probably represent at least 25% of all cases and all deaths in the NYC area - all because their Governor refused to shut down the city day after day, with the highest population density in our country and with known, expansive spread of the Coronavirus among the city's population!
Yes, the USA has made some huge mistakes - like the refusal to do the obvious in NYC/NY. We have done a poor job of providing a consistent message, both from the media, the government and the various States/Governors. Yes, we did not use the WHO tests (which in the end proved to be faulty) and instead chose to develop our own tests (which also used a faulty part that was intended to be used as a double check to see if the testee actually had the "generic" flu - designed to be used to detect false negatives in the two parts of the test that were testing for the coronavirus). But the US has also taken many very smart steps to stem the flow of infections. We were among the first countries (1/31) to block travel from China and people who had visited China. This was hugely unpopular at the time - the mass media claimed it was dumb, combative, juvenile and counter productive (of course, now most of that very same media is criticizing our government for having not done it sooner!). We implemented mandatory quarantines for repatriated American's from overseas. That was so unpopular by the media, that the ACLU actually threatened to sue our government on the premise that it was against our civil rights! Apparently somebody thought that one through and weighed the consequences of the "egg on face" if they actually won that suit - only to find a large spread of infections from those repatriated Americans that went unquarantined. Then when outbreaks started in the EU, our government shut off travel from the EU nations - and again the media attacked our government for that decision - saying it's apparent protectionist attitude was harmful, was anti-American, and was simply dumb and wouldn't accomplish anything anyway!
In the end, this pandemic will play it's course. Hopefully, we can find some medicines that will reduce the symptoms and save lives - making it a little bit less scary. Hopefully, we'll find a reliable vaccine that will be ready in time so that we won't have to worry about the virus re-emerging at a later date and causing more of the same damage. But mostly, hopefully, we'll get lucky and this will pass. Perhaps, we'll even learn something from this pandemic, from the 2009 MERS, the 2009/2010 H1N1 Pandemic, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the 2015 ZIKA outbreak, the 2002/03 SARS outbreak, and of course the big one, the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. So over the past 100 years, of these major health outbreaks and pandemics, all but two have attacked respiratory systems - and yet, during all these administrations and these different government leaders over all these years (even recently), and us as a population have really done nothing to very little to be prepared for the next one! During most of these outbreaks and pandemics - we as a country never even bothered to timely cut off travel from high-exposure countries in an effort to prevent the import of these diseases into our own country! In the end, we simply got LUCKY with these other pandemics - we didn't prevent them, slow them, or stop them out of any degree of intentional government actions - we truly simply just got lucky that those diseases did not spread into our country at high enough rates.
I remember clearly the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Then our government refused to shut down our borders from those countries actively experiencing outbreaks (though we did suggest that the third world countries monitor passengers getting on airplanes). There were some that highly criticized our government for putting American's at risk by not doing so (myself included). The Government and nearly all of the media claimed it was not humanitarian to restrict such travel - it would not be good for our image or for the image of those infected countries! Instead, it was decided we'd "check" passengers arriving for fever (hoping they'd be symptomatic at their time of entry into the USA) - a hope and a prayer approach. But we got lucky, and that is all we counted on, and we didn't see contagion and community spread in the USA. Maybe it is fortunate that Ebola is so deadly and so quick and spread only when symptoms are present that the "hope and prayer" approach worked - but it really boiled down to luck in the end. We took a naive approach, we ignored the worst-case scenario risks, we pretended it wouldn't/couldn't happen here. We really did somewhere between absolutely nothing and the absolute minimum - and got lucky in the end. And worse, for years after that, we refused to recognize that we simply got lucky and did virtually no concrete planning for the next instance when maybe we wouldn't get so lucky! In the end, we were just as unprepared for ZIKA in 2015 - sure some States sprayed for Mosquitos and citizens took it upon themselves to wear mosquito repellent - but once again, our Government demonstrated it had no grasp on the situation and the potential risk to our society and in the end, did virtually nothing - certainly less than what our government has done during the current pandemic - but of course, nothing was done in advance, it has all continued to be mostly reactionary approaches.
Can we really prepare for a pandemic? What does that really mean?