Guest post: Their decision to rely on scientific and medical advice
Originally a comment by Rob on A table.
There is ample evidence (and in some quarters acknowledgement) that the US is undercounting deaths in retirement homes, amongst the homeless and especially just deaths at home. NYC acknowledged they simply stopped counting those because they were not testing bodies, yet the home death rate went from around 25 per day to 250 per day. Do the maths on that one.
So far NZ has had 12 fatalities. One at home, 10 in hospital of which I think 9 were associated with rest home clusters (7 from a dementia care facility in my city), which just shows how awful the disease is when it hits such places.
We have been very fortunate in that NZ was well set up to observe what was happening overseas and we have an early defended border for quarantine purposes. More to the point we have had political leaders that were united in their decision to rely on scientific and medical advice and the clarity and effectiveness of communication has been nothing short of brilliant. We’ve also done something like 85K tests (17k per million of population). Considering our health systems and government have nothing like the resources and wealth of the US or many other western nations — and that we were on an Italy-like trajectory — that decision making and communication from our politicians is what has made the difference between a health disaster and economic disruption.
That said, we have had at least two deaths resulting from non-covid harm that can be attributed to the pandemic. One was an elderly man who was physically well but suffered severe anxiety as a result of the lockdown and the inability to see friends and loved ones. I understand the anti-anxiety drugs killed him. The other was a young man who disappeared the day the Lockdown was announced. Again prone to depression and anxiety.
All tragic. Where do you begin and end counting victims. In Japan hospitals are turning away people suffering from strokes and heart attacks because they are overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases.
Umm, thanks? Surprised that ramble got a guest post. I guess paragraph 3 is the important part.
Ample evidence? Then it should be super easy to cite any evidence. Go ahead!
Weird, because the stories I’ve seen are quite the opposite, that they’re counting “presumed” covid-19 deaths in the absence of an actual positive test:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-deaths.html
An interesting feature of the NZ story, Rob, is that a business delegation pushed Arden hard for a full lockdown.
Compare that business lobby and Fox in the US. Observing quarantine for itself; urging the plebs back to work.
True. Fact based long term thinking. While some business people and politicians are now calling for an end to our Level 4 lock down, some were as recently as this morning saying a further two weeks, while economically bad, would be better than the disease taking off again.
As it is we will exit full lockdown on 27th April and go into Level 3, where we will stay for a minimum of 2 weeks.
Families have to stay in bubbles. No school opening beyond year 10 and voluntary that year and below. Preference that we work from home. Retail of all types must be contactless. Businesses that must have people at work sites can do so provided they can ensure proper separation and hygiene. Personal exercise is now permitted within wider region, but close to home preferred. this means we can head up the nearby hills or a few km away to the beach, rather than endlessly walking around the local loops with 2km of home.
Likely to be some time till we have dinner with friends again, but at least they’re alive…
Here is a very good video on a promising roadmap for reopening and recovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhRQxk9QA-o
Rob @ 1 – call it a ramble if you like but it’s news from elsewhere for me and others, so it’s informative and interesting. So there.
Skeletor @2,
That’s unduly aggressive, don’t you think? Rob was writing a casual comment, not submitting a paper for peer review. Considering your own habit of hit-and-run posting, you’re hardly in a position to take someone else to task for not complying with whatever high school debate club rules you think we’re all obligated to follow.
How hard did you look? You linked to a single NYT piece, which supports Rob’s position and not yours:
NYT:
And in case you’re hanging your hat on those “presumed” deaths being overcounting, here is a fact check with links to numerous supporting pieces, which I found in ten seconds of Googling. Which you apparently couldn’t be bothered to do while making your snide put-down of Rob. It explains that those “presumed” deaths aren’t just speculation by the doctors, they’re based on hard medical evidence. Conversely, if you relied only on dead people who had tested positive, you’d be grossly undercounting because of both the many untested dead and the false negatives.
Oh, by the way, you also utterly failed to respond to Rob’s point about how the general death rate in NYC has gone up by an amount that is at least highly suggestive of many additional COVID deaths.
How about you actually do some reading and respond to a follow up in a thread for once, Skeletor?
Well Rob, as a fellow kiwi, albeit an expatriate one, I have been impressed with Jacinda Ardern’s response, also relieved as I feel my family and friends are safe. There are variables to explain the very low numbers of deaths compared to other countries. I understand that those who did bring the virus from overseas were young travellers, who would naturally recover. Also NZers don’t use public transport much (more’s the pity in normal circumstances); the population leads a healthy outdoor life as a whole; the cities are spread out with the average person having more space around their home than they do in the UK. But a lot of it does seem to do with policy, and Ardern’s response to the mosque shooting show her as a decisive leader who communicates brilliantly.
I understand the Minister for Health was seen driving to a beach and so had to be demoted, like the Chief Medical Officer here in Scotland. It’s very hard to keep an NZer from the beach.
Screechy, I have a big smile on my face right now, does that make me a bad person. Thank you.
KBPlayer, all true. I think Ardern is sadly a rather average PM most of the time, but give her a challenge, or a crisis, and she suddenly steps up to brilliant.
@Rob – yeah – and if you aren’t a NZer, you only see her at moments of crisis, so you think she’s wonderful.
That’s always the way with outsiders – they see your leaders at a few very high or low moments, and judge them by that, not by their bread-and-butter way of governing. Churchill was bad at governing through a lot of his career, but was the right man during a huge crisis.
KBPlayer @10, I think there is much to admire about Ardern. She’s clearly empathetic, but at the same time applies facts and logic to her decisions as well. My criticism of her is that during ‘routine’ periods of government she perhaps worries too much about the fine detail and applying political and social calculus to them. This gives the outside appearance of being wishy washy and lacking a firm hand on the tiller. Give her a crisis and all of a sudden you have all her best aspects and her worst fall away. Oh if only she could govern at that pitch permanently. I imagine it would be physically and emotionally impossible.
That said, especially at these times that keep throwing one crisis after another at us, I can’t think of another politician in NZ I’d rather have in charge. The leader of the National party is at heart a staunch social conservative with a streak of authoritarian in him, an overwhelming sense of entitlement and therefore grievance that he lost the last election and remarkably poor judgement at critical times. He seems uncomfortable being statesman like and keeps trying what are nakedly watered down trump ploys that come across shrill and try-hard. Appeals to some.
Except Trump, who seems to demand the spotlight in many places for a lot of the time. You see him at his lows, but he has no highs. You see him at his pettiest, but he has no non-petty. You see him at his meanest, but he has no nice. So because he is all low, maybe that’s why he seems to be spotlighted in so many places, because his impact is felt so globally…in almost universally bad ways (unless your name is Putin).
A moderately conservative NZ friend isn’t too impressed with Ardern generally.
From what you’re saying she merits 8/10 for overall performance, which is good going for a politician.
@iknlast Trump, one hopes, is sui generis.
If he is not, Gawd help us all.
PM Johnson is bad in a lot of ways – lazy, opportunistic, a poor communicator, and absolutely not a good man in a crisis but he’s not monstrous like Trump.
Of our recent Prime Ministers both Tony Blair and especially Gordon Brown would have performed fairly well. Clever men both, and decisive.
KBP, one of the features of this election cycle has been just how bent out of shape National voters have been about losing. I mean, no one ever likes their favoured political party losing, but this time around it seems National and its supporters genuinely expected to win and win convincingly. They certainly won the largest plurality of votes. But, in a proportional democracy that doesn’t guarantee a win. They were apoplectic when NZ First opted to ally with Labour rather than them and have tried to portray the Government as representing a minority ever since, even though on the facts that’s nonsense. Much of National’s and its stalking horses actions since have been nakedly about winning the next election using any means or argument they can, including using trump-lite talking points and techniques. When a political party begins to show signs of feeling they are entitled to win and the ends justify the means, it’s time to burn it to the ground and start again.
@KBPlayer:
I’d argue that his monstrosity is just on a smaller scale than Trump’s. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky.
I know that real life intrudes on everyone’s comment-posting capacity from time to time, that some people can only post once or twice a day, and that being in moderation can impose additional delays. But it’s now been 36 hours since Skeletor’s post @2, and about 24 hours since my response @7. Given Skeletor’s history, and the fact that OB specifically called him out on his post-and-run tendencies on multiple occasions recently, this is beginning to look like utter cowardice, not to mention contempt for our host.
It’s true about not everyone being able to comment often, which is why I gave Skeletor a lot of latitude for a long time, but the latest iteration of the pattern was one too many. Skeletor has been silent since yesterday’s “You’ve put me in moderation now do you want to be a hive mind blah blah” comment.
Not everyone can comment often (and not everyone wants to), and obviously that’s fine, but IF you want to pick fights whenever you do comment, then…I may decide I don’t want any more dead-end fights. There’s just no point to them.
Incidentally, I just came across this bit of information that bears on the undercounting issue:
The CDC has always assumed that infectious disease deaths are undercounted if you rely just on reported causes of death. Accordingly, all those death numbers you see for influenza (that the denialists are so fond of quoting) or H1N1 (which Trump loves to blame on Obama) were calculated using statistical inference, i.e. multiplying the actual listed-on-the-death-certificate deaths by a factor to compensate for known undercounting issues.
From the above link:
Screechy, that’s sort of like diabetes. My mother technically died of congestive heart failure, which is what is listed on her death certificate. But the CHF was at least in part the result of her diabetes, so the underlying cause of death is more than just CHF.
iknklast,
Yeah, I’ve heard doctors remark that technically, pretty much everyone dies of heart failure in one way or another, which is why there’s often a “secondary” (I forget the terminology) cause listed.
Another example would be how (almost?) nobody literally died directly from AIDS, but rather from the opportunistic infections that resulted after AIDS crippled their immune system.