
Ten countries kept out Covid, but did they win? - canada_random1
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53831063
======
Animats
A drop of only 5-10% in GDP? They won.

They're tiny isolated islands with tourism as a major industry. How's New
Zealand doing?

~~~
goalieca
The funny thing about New Zealand is that the new outbreak has genetics unique
to New Zealand. It’s very likely that they never actually rid themselves of it
and that it had time to mutate. It could be seen as a warning that suppression
works only so long as you keep suppressing even under relatively ideal
conditions.

~~~
crummy
I think it's unlikely that it's been spreading around undetected for 100 days,
and suddenly we've noticed it. We've found nearly 100 new cases in the mass
testing that has come out of this outbreak, but they all can be traced back to
a single source.

------
vecinu
Well, they did the best they could with the hand they were dealt. As the
article states, their economy would have been impacted one way or another but
dealing with COVID and the lack of tourism would have been devastating.

It sounds to me like the answer to the question is Yes, they won as best as
they could have. When most of your GDP depends on tourism and exports, you
lose a significant chunk of revenue due to the external effects of COVID-19 on
your customers.

------
vmception
I don’t understand how people can see a global response and repercussions like
this and then politicize their local government’s attempt to keep the R0 below
2.5.

~~~
LoSboccacc
a day ago there were estimate that anout basically everyone in NYC has having
been in contact with the virus at some point and the city doesn't look like a
wasteland.

lethality was grossly overestimate and subsequent decision built off not only
partial and incomplete data, but flat out wrong.

would full lock down have been the best course of action? probably still so.
but the extent and duration and especially now follow up actions seem
extremely exaggerated.

there's quite a difference in Italy for example from the "hundreds new cases a
day" in march, with a unknown size pool of undetected cases, and "hundred new
cases a day" but everyone else is fine and contact tracing will find the rest.

the issue is political because the GDP and welfare budget are intertwined. and
then there's the big hairy issue with schooling.

the world isn't black and white and fighting the virus can't be the sole
priority for six months, let alone one or more years.

but both now and yesterday people with a wide view of the issue were basically
ostracized and chased away as if they were flat earther or antivaxxer.

it's about time people start questioning what is the long term plan and if the
previous decisions were data driven or scare driven.

~~~
joshuahughes
“but both now and yesterday people with a wide view of the issue were
basically ostracized and chased away as if they were flat earther or
antivaxxer”

Agreed. I’ve been quite taken aback, seeing HN’s response to Covid threads.
I’ve always assumed the community was willing to ask tough questions and
entertain alternative points of view that are backed by data, but with Covid
there’s a complete unwillingness to think about anything other than “deaths
bad, lockdown good”. It’s a shame that more nuanced comments get voted down so
hard as they’re important to discuss too.

My theory: There must be something about us tech industry types that makes a
‘germaphobic’ response more likely. For instance, the WHO have said there’s no
point wiping down food packaging because it just isn’t a vector for the virus.
Yet I’ve seen dozens of HN comments about doing this and/or leaving groceries
in quarantine for days. It really isn’t rational or logical and yet it’s this
response that gets the support of the community. Very strange.

~~~
ImaCake
Just as an alternative perspective, I fully support lockdowns. But I have
noted the opposite response on here compared to your observation; lots of
people are arguing against the lockdowns on HN. Maybe we see what we want to
see rather than what is actually there? Seems like a typical human bias.

~~~
joshuahughes
Yes, clearly “lots of people are arguing against the lockdowns on HN“. My
point is that if you do that, you will usually get downvoted to death.

Just like everything else these days, too many people are adopting a black or
white stance on a topic when actually there’s tons of murky grey in the
middle. I see way too many rational and reasonable comments get totally
destroyed because they dared to question the status quo. It’s an unhealthy
environment to exist in.

------
marmshallow
Seeing as all these terrible economic outcomes would happen whether or not the
virus infected the population, I think this is a pretty solid win and a poor
article title.

~~~
euudheehdy
Most of the terrible economic outcomes have been due to the lockdowns not the
actual deaths. Losing 1% of the population isn't a massive economic blow when
that 1% is predominantly composed of no and low income groups, it is however a
moral blow. The difference is important however because, while early on total
lock-downs made sense, the reality is that if only 1% of the population is at
risk of death then the other 99% should be working to minimize the cost of
supporting the most vulnerable in countries where a full viral suppression is
unlikely.

~~~
bachmeier
Sorry, but this is a pretty confused post, and your first sentence shows a lot
of the problems with it.

> Most of the terrible economic outcomes have been due to the lockdowns not
> the actual deaths.

First, it's not lockdowns vs deaths. The biggest factor by far in the US was
the existence of the virus.
[https://privwww.ssrn.com/abstract=3631180](https://privwww.ssrn.com/abstract=3631180)

"While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal
restrictions explain only 7 percentage points of this. Individual choices were
far more important"

But you don't need a fancy study. States that didn't have lockdowns saw
similar economic declines to other states, even though they should have
experienced a boom on the border as people traveled in to do business if it
was the lockdown.

Second, deaths are not the only cost. People get sick, too, and it's a pretty
big deal for many of them even if you don't see it on TV. It's possible
they'll have permanent organ damage and shorter lives. Those people call in
sick, or worse, they go to work and get others sick.

Third, if you let it get out of control, you overwhelm the hospital system.
It's hard to see how that helps.

~~~
gnusty_gnurc
> It's possible they'll have permanent organ damage and shorter lives.

It's clear to me that people use this argument as a virtual escape hatch from
any critical argument about the response to coronavirus.

We don't really even have a specific number of how many people were infected -
never mind the number of people with long-term effects. We don't even really
know the long-term effects (and descriptions are relatively vague). It's
probable that the prevalence and severity of those effects are overstated.

Given the evidence so far, it seems reasonable to assume the overwhelming
majority of healthy people are not at risk from the virus. And appealing to
things _we don 't know_ and assuming the worst-case isn't realistic - it's a
convenient way to justify medieval mitigation methods that decimate the
economy and violate civil liberties, while casting any objectors as
misanthropes.

------
nearting
The ten countries: Palau, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Kiribati,
Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Samoa, Vanuatu, Tonga

~~~
sradman
Some of these are top scuba diving destinations. They depend on regional air
hubs, all presumably closed to non-essential connecting flights.

I wonder if these ten nations, all Melanesian/Polynesian with historical ties
to the Anglo sphere, represent a true COVID-19 resistant pattern or are just
reporting anomalies.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> represent a true COVID-19 resistant pattern or are just reporting anomalies.

Probably anomalies. We're talking small, small population groups on isolated
islands.

I mean it's possible there is a Polynesian DNA thing that helps make them
resistant, sort of a smallpox-in-reverse advantage, but my money says it's
just because 1) super isolated, and 2) because of point 1 they can very
effectively filter traffic and quarantine those who are questionable.

~~~
sradman
I was thinking socio-economic and transportation connectedness rather than
genetic resistance. Anglo-centric Cook Islands vs. French Polynesia, for
instance, and the evolved political, economic, transportation, and health
systems.

It could be something as simple as incoming flights mostly originating from
one of Sydney, Singapore, or Hawaii and the travel restrictions implemented at
each hub. We are also maybe placing to much emphasis on zero-per-hundred-
thousand compared to one-per-hundred-thousand stats.

------
INTPenis
40% of GDP from tourism. So in a perfect world now it would be time for the
government to take that saved tourism money and support their citizens so they
survive/stay until the next tourist season. Or borrow money from other nations
to do so.

And is it really sane to stay 100% covid free? I mean I would assume that when
tourism starts up again it will start a wave of covid infections in these
countries.

~~~
LittlePeter
40% seems very high. Is that a worldwide average?

I found that it is around 10%:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099933/travel-and-
touri...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099933/travel-and-tourism-
share-of-gdp/)

------
shadowprofile77
Awful lot of privileged software engineer types with relatively cushy
lockdown-friendly jobs, good income, savings, covered healthcare and good
homes that leap to criticize as selfish, greedy, irresponsible and dumb anyone
who insists that economic consequences from lockdown are possibly, just maybe,
for many, many hundreds of millions of people all around the world something a
bit more than just going short of travel and discretionary income for a few
months.

Do any of you even know that a much wider and largely poorer world exists
outside your highly developed bubble? Do you not fathom that for billions of
people all around the world, the money you don't earn by working today means
no food tomorrow and possibly no electricity or capability of paying the
doctors visit for your kid next week?

Do you not grasp that for most of these billions of people, the work necessary
to get this basic income on a daily and weekly basis absolutely depends on the
ability to leave home and engage in external economic activity?

The economic losses that have already been caused by attempts at lockdown are
NOT just about some lost income. In so many cases, they literally affect the
most fundamental aspects of being able to survive without suffering very
badly.

The privileged righteousness that ignores this here is way too common, and
awfully foolish. Especially when you consider that we're still in the middle
of all this and not even the world's best experts can yet concretely say that
lockdowns have done much or that they were the better choice vs trying to keep
the economy of so many places from falling so far.

~~~
thesizeofa
Do you not grasp that in most countries where lockdowns took place people had
government support? Do you not fathom that most countries have publicly
accessible healthcare? Do you not understand that not all countries ditch
their vulnerable under the bus in such unprecedented times? Is it such an
alien concept the fact that us, the high earning developers pay tax precisely
to help those in need? What a strange view of the world some of you have in a
country pretending to be rich, yet it collapses at first sign of real trouble.

~~~
joshuahughes
Why the extreme response? Thousands and thousands of folks here in the UK are
losing their jobs and therefore their homes. I assume the same thing is
happening elsewhere. We have safety nets, but payouts are often nowhere near
enough to match income that’s been lost. It’s a real disappointment to me that
HN has decided there’s only one right way to talk about the Covid response,
and every other point of view is idiotic or evil. Whatever happened to nuance?

~~~
kungato
Maybe the uk is not socialist enough

~~~
joshuahughes
The measures that the UK government put in place are impressive, but they’ve
pushed the nation’s debt to more than £2trillion. There’s no escaping the fact
that we’ll be paying for these measures for generations.

This is the problem with a socialist solution. We can make things ‘fair’ now,
but SOMEONE, at some point in the future, has to pay. Is it really fair that
the bill for this falls on future generations? They‘re likely to still be
paying off OUR debt in 50 years time. What happens if they have their own
‘Covid‘ before the bill is paid? They’ll already be on the back foot
financially.

I don’t resent us helping folks now. But I do resent what it means for my
kids, and their kids, and so on.

------
Ansil849
This article's casual collusion of winning in terms of not losing any lives to
the virus and winning in terms of the tourist industry taking a hit is crass,
at best.

~~~
mamon
You're looking at this from privileged perspective of Bay Area software
engineer, who can work from home, or even take few months break from work
altoghether.

"Economy taking a hit" is just an euphemism for real tragedies, like people
losing their jobs, their homes, not being able to pay for healthcare, etc. I
read that there was a spike in suicides since the beginning of the lockdowns
for those very reasons.

So now you can weight number of lives saved from COVID vs number of lives
destroyed by lockdows, and only then you'll know if they were worth it.

------
TheButlerian
Win? What do they plan on doing without a vaccine? Stay shutin forever?

