New Zealand - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

[hayleyearth]

I can't take any more of this lockdown!!! I need out. We need out! Even our little daughter is going crazy! A drive in the car is like a drug. The word "school" sends her running for her bag and shoes and then she paces to the car.

 

I feel for her!

I need to go to work!!

I need sushi when I want it!

[Wayne Potgieter]

I can't take any more of this lockdown!!! I need out. We need out! Even our little daughter is going crazy! A drive in the car is like a drug. The word "school" sends her running for her bag and shoes and then she paces to the car.

 

I feel for her!

I need to go to work!!

I need sushi when I want it!

It really is a shame we cannot extend our bubble to just one other family if it is mutual.

[patches]

It really is a shame we cannot extend our bubble to just one other family if it is mutual.

 

We were applying some logic around this yesterday.

 

If I am an outlier from my bubble (because I go to work each day and interact with my colleagues). And one of my really good friends is married to one of my colleagues, but he has to work from home and is trapped in his bubble, with his wife being the outlier.

 

Logically there is not much issue with me hanging out with that friend, because our bubbles already overlap.

 

But the rules say otherwise.

Edited April 20, 2020 by patches

[intern]

Looks like they agreed, 2 more weeks before dropping to level 3 making it just after Anzac day weekend.

Then 2 weeks at level 3 before reassessing.

 

I understand the idea of elimination over flattening but part of me thinks that just opens the country up to being susceptible to the next wave of infection surely? Perhaps there may be a vaccine by then and so it is a moot point but you aren't building up herd immunity at all then.

 

Elimination is a pipe dream and Saint Jacinda has even gone as far now to redefine the word 'elimination' for political purposes, so elimination no longer means what you thought it did but now has a classic Orwellian twist on it. How we gonna eliminate a virus? One in which up to 80 percent of carriers are asymptomatic and probably won't ever be tested (but will infect others).

The wave of devastation never was coming in the first place. Rean Ian Harrison's expose of the modeling used by treasury. We're committing economic suicide and sleepwalking into a totalitarian society where people are encouraged to nark on their neighbours for - get this- exercising their fundamental freedoms.

While the health minister is absent mountain biking and the cops are the only ones with a cafe open.

Mark my words, the cure is going to well outweigh a disease that upwards of 99 percent of us will recover from should we get it.

[intern]

Read, not rean. 

[patham]

We were applying some logic around this yesterday.

 

If I am an outlier from my bubble (because I go to work each day and interact with my colleagues). And one of my really good friends is married to one of my colleagues, but he has to work from home and is trapped in his bubble, with his wife being the outlier.

 

Logically there is not much issue with me hanging out with that friend, because our bubbles already overlap.

 

But the rules say otherwise.

 

Don't bring logic onto my studio ! (obscure saffa reference).

 

Its like over here in Queensland. You can only exercise with one other person. However, you can have two people visit your house. Hence, if your two visitors parked down the road, you could not walk back to the car with them, lest be accused of breaking the exercise rule.

[patham]

Elimination is a pipe dream and Saint Jacinda has even gone as far now to redefine the word 'elimination' for political purposes, so elimination no longer means what you thought it did but now has a classic Orwellian twist on it. How we gonna eliminate a virus? One in which up to 80 percent of carriers are asymptomatic and probably won't ever be tested (but will infect others).

The wave of devastation never was coming in the first place. Rean Ian Harrison's expose of the modeling used by treasury. We're committing economic suicide and sleepwalking into a totalitarian society where people are encouraged to nark on their neighbours for - get this- exercising their fundamental freedoms.

While the health minister is absent mountain biking and the cops are the only ones with a cafe open.

Mark my words, the cure is going to well outweigh a disease that upwards of 99 percent of us will recover from should we get it.

 

Really, I don't know how you can expect police to do their jobs without coffee and donuts. It's like PPE for their soul.

[intern]

Watch out for do-gooders, as Clive Staples Lewis noted back in the 40s (heroic second name there, Clive):

 

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

[intern]

Don't bring logic onto my studio ! (obscure saffa reference).

 

Its like over here in Queensland. You can only exercise with one other person. However, you can have two people visit your house. Hence, if your two visitors parked down the road, you could not walk back to the car with them, lest be accused of breaking the exercise rule.

 

This one small example shows up the immense problems which have always, always and everywhere, led to the abject failure of command and control economies. Bureaucrats, eager as they are with their clipboards and petty rules, cannot possibly hope to imagine all the scenarios, activities, exchanges, movements and actions of free men (and women, though the latter tend to be more quiescent), let alone the immensely complex interactions of a modern market economy. So now we have all manner of absurdities...like which business are and are not 'essential' (this one's easy: they're all essential, or they would not exist in the first place), which activities are OK and which are verboten.

This whole thing stinks, enormously. I don't like existing under a jackboot, no matter how well intentioned.

[intern]

Really, I don't know how you can expect police to do their jobs without coffee and donuts. It's like PPE for their soul.

 

I too have a soul powered by coffee and donuts where possible.

[patches]

Don't bring logic onto my studio ! (obscure saffa reference).

 

Its like over here in Queensland. You can only exercise with one other person. However, you can have two people visit your house. Hence, if your two visitors parked down the road, you could not walk back to the car with them, lest be accused of breaking the exercise rule.

 

Say whaaaat?

 

[intern]

Here is Ian Harrison's examination of the Treasury modelling.

http://www.tailrisk.co.nz/documents/Corona.pdf

Smart folk like Patches and Patham and Hayley and WP are likely to recognise, too, that modeling is just that: it is not the real world, it is a model, made by people, and therefore no more than an educated guess. How well educated rests on the soundness of the premises in the model, and it appears the premises in Treasury modelling weren't terrifically sound in the first instance.

Once we've 'eliminated' coronavirus, when do we start adding up the bodies of those who will suicide as their life savings evaporate? When their businesses close? Their livelihoods ripped away from them? Because like night follows day, that is coming.

[patches]

Elimination is a pipe dream and Saint Jacinda has even gone as far now to redefine the word 'elimination' for political purposes, so elimination no longer means what you thought it did but now has a classic Orwellian twist on it. How we gonna eliminate a virus? One in which up to 80 percent of carriers are asymptomatic and probably won't ever be tested (but will infect others).

The wave of devastation never was coming in the first place. Rean Ian Harrison's expose of the modeling used by treasury. We're committing economic suicide and sleepwalking into a totalitarian society where people are encouraged to nark on their neighbours for - get this- exercising their fundamental freedoms.

While the health minister is absent mountain biking and the cops are the only ones with a cafe open.

Mark my words, the cure is going to well outweigh a disease that upwards of 99 percent of us will recover from should we get it.

 

Just yesterday I was saying to a colleague that the number of suicides resulting from failed businesses, insurmountable debt, bankruptcy and other financial stresses will surpass the number of deaths caused by the disease.

 

And as callous as putting values on life may sound, those suicides will likely be people 25 - 45, possibly with young children, not 80yr+ people in aged care with underlying conditions.

[intern]

I think the effectiveness of the NZ lockdown has caught everyone by surprise.

 

That we are likely to eliminate it rather than 'flatten the curve' has caught everyone by surprise - and probably caused some consternaton and confusion.

 

The ideal is we're all exposed, but at very low viral loads so that most of us live - and then we can face the rest of the world.

 

But now we're like Kiwis and just about all the other NZ other native fauna - at risk of anything coming across the border as we don't have the tools to resist it!

 

They had to pivot to 'elimination' because there was no curve to flatten. See here

https://thebfd.co.nz/2020/04/21/elimination-strategy-a-bullet-to-the-stomach-for-nz/

And remember the piece from an EPIDEMIOLOGIST, someone who studies infectious diseases and not that pink haired princess who is a MICROBIOLOGIST, who dared suggest 'are we squashing a mosquito with a sledgehammer' (and faced massive opprobrium as a result). That was on Stuff a while ago; Siouxsie Wiles subsequently went at him with all kinds of ad hominems.

[patches]

Here is Ian Harrison's examination of the Treasury modelling.

http://www.tailrisk.co.nz/documents/Corona.pdf

Smart folk like Patches and Patham and Hayley and WP are likely to recognise, too, that modeling is just that: it is not the real world, it is a model, made by people, and therefore no more than an educated guess. How well educated rests on the soundness of the premises in the model, and it appears the premises in Treasury modelling weren't terrifically sound in the first instance.

Once we've 'eliminated' coronavirus, when do we start adding up the bodies of those who will suicide as their life savings evaporate? When their businesses close? Their livelihoods ripped away from them? Because like night follows day, that is coming.

 

Yup, you beat me to it.

[intern]

Just yesterday I was saying to a colleague that the number of suicides resulting from failed businesses, insurmountable debt, bankruptcy and other financial stresses will surpass the number of deaths caused by the disease.

 

And as callous as putting values on life may sound, those suicides will likely be people 25 - 45, possibly with young children, not 80yr+ people in aged care with underlying conditions.

 

Lives have value, but not all have the same value. From Harrison's paper:

 

Focus of deaths needs to be supplemented with an adjustment for life years lost Not all deaths have the same social cost. The death of a 90 year old can be sad, but the death of a child or young adult is almost always a tragedy. Burden of disease estimates often adjust for the number of life years lost and this adjustment should be made in assessments of the benefits of intervention options. All of New Zealands nine deaths have been over 70 years old and had underlying health issues. This in line with international experience, which suggests that 85-90 percent of deaths have been in the 70+ age group. The true burden of the epidemic can be calculated by applying an factor of around 0.15 to the number of account for life years lost. 500 deaths becomes, 75 on an adjusted basis, and can be compared with the 350 lives lost on the roads each year.