Monday, April 6, 2020

One potential NZ future.



Here's one potential NZ future.
We are presently engaged in not a mitigation strategy but a unique and ambitious strategy of eradication.
Under lockdown to prevent spread we are attempting to identify all carriers, via testing around known clusters and also the symptomatic.
It might work. It might not, asymptomatics might create clusters that multiply too quickly to be contained. But at the moment we are poised between success and failure. Our daily newly identified infected are not growing explosively.
If this fails we’ll switch to mitigation and be like every other model.
If it succeeds it’s going to be really interesting.
We’ll be an isolated country without the virus, the only one.
Public gatherings will not be dangerous, concerts, movies, daily life etc.
It will be like that one thing NZ had, always being slightly behind the rest of the world [in our minds and in our general culture] will be our jewel.
Tourism will be surreal. There may have to be two week initial compulsory quarantine options involving being shepherded between exclusive isolated places, perhaps staffed by some of the couple of hundred recovered who have it is presumed some degree of immunity before inclusion into NZ public life is allowed.
How exclusive would that make us as a destination!
It’s not nearly over and it’s not decided as to whether success or failure of this current strategy will prevail.
It’s so very balanced between success or failure at this point. Holding out with 89 new cases one day, 71 the next, 82 the next.
Will it bend up or down?
So much in the balance.

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