I think this is a little disingenuous IMO, especially the line that "Māori and Pacific peoples are not over-represented in the stats for deaths caused by Covid" - when you look at the 0-59yo deaths, they are as high as Pākehā, despite their much lower overall % population (although their populations are younger), and it ignores the fact that both peoples have significantly lower life expectancies and higher vulnerabilities than Pākehā.
Also, at the time, as you point out, nobody knew just how bad the human toll would be, nor did we know that vaccines could be developed as fast as they could (likely not to happen in the future, with the Trump regime killing mRNA research). I am certainly grateful for the incredibly strong and science-backed response our government had - and because I work internationally, I could see daily just how enormously different our lifestyles were here compared with the horrors other countries had to deal with. Human psychology means we all forgot those horrors and the nuances of how uncertain those times were, and just remember the personal inconveniences.
That said, I agree with both, that we need to be better prepared for future pandemics, and should put a significant portion of our cash reserves into our health system, including cardiovascular health (and prevention). But that should also include a discussion to get rid of the idiotic 30/30 rule Bernard Hickey keeps highlighting as screwing our country, under both major party rules...
It surprises me how the results appear to suggest ~50/50 either side of this issue.
I wonder how people think spending $66B was worth it - suggests to me those who think it was haven't really thought much about it and are falling back to their own self defence (i.e. not prepared to re-evaluate their previous position). For me here's some reasons I don't think it was worth it:
1) It was and is clear the overwhelming majority of deaths were in the 80+ bracket and yet we shut down all of society. Wildly we shut schools, all workplaces etc even though children and working age people had little to fear. i.e. we could have spent a fraction to protect the known vulnerable while letting the rest of us keep life, society and the economy going
2) Given a total of 2900 lives lost thats $22M/life lost. That's not lives saved of course but...
3) Given the age distribution of deaths you can also work out the cost for each (expected) year of life saved. Doing that simple calculation comes out to $5M/year of life lost.
Some will argue that without the measures a lot more people would have died but the alternative to what occurred is not NO measures, but targeted protection. It's hard not to think we could have put in targeted measures around the aged and vulnerable more effectively and for far less effort/cost that would have worked just as well, if not better.
Instead the government used the sledgehammer approach, assumed elimination was a viable strategy in the medium/long term, and locked us all down. The elimination strategy was an idealistic and illusory goal that is what caused so much damage IMO.
As well as saving lives of the elderly (and some younger people), remember that the lockdowns saved the hospital system from burnout through trying (and often failing) to save so many dying people. So that was an important reason on the side of strict lockdowns - not just lifesaving. And not filling the hospitals with Covid sufferers allowed many surgery queues and treatment queues to continue moving, to the benefit of not just the old. But I haven’t answered your 2 quizzes, as I don’t feel I know enough to decide. I’m glad I didn’t have to make those decisions and wear the political consequences! Though I’m often frustrated with our political leaders, I acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of their role.
Thanks, Kai. I do recall that traffic fatalities dropped dramatically during the first lockdown. Unfortunately, I'm finding that it's not possible to separate a rational post-facto evaluation (so that we do it better next time) from people's will to defend or blame those in office at the time who, as you point put, were having to make the decisions without full knowledge. It's exacerbated over here at the moment by those same leaders choosing not to appear before public hearings of the Royal Commission.
As a personal anecdote, Richard, I had one minor procedure cancelled "because of Covid". I got better anyway, but I'm sure there are other stories of the kind.
My point is that the disruption to the health system would have been much greater - would perhaps have done irreparable damage - without the lockdowns. Certainly there was some disruption from the pandemic anyway.
I'm not so sure about that. It's an assumption that the impact on the health system would have been much greater. Sure there would have been more Covid around if NZ didn't follow an elimination strategy but there are two factors to consider:
1) Had the government put most of their resources into targeted protection it is quite possible the serious illness (of the vulnerable) could actually have been reduced.
2) There's an assumption on most people's part that the vaccine once it arrived made a big difference but you should note it neither stopped the catching of or spread. Right from the start it only reduced absolute incidence by 0.84% which is pretty marginal really and when you read the medical statements that it "reduced severe illness" that only applies to the those that actually had sever illness. i.e. It is not correct to think that it reduced severity in the general population.
On top of this there was a whole lot of hysteria that both the health sector partook in that reduced its own effectiveness at the time and the general population being scared that having Covid warranted going to hospital.
It sounds as though you're an anti-vaxxer. Once the vaccine was in use here in Australia, pretty much all the severe cases needing hospitalisation here in Australia (about 95% of them, as I recall) were the unvaccinated - and these included even young people and children. Think about it - think about what would have happened if the virus had been allowed to spread unchecked through the general population before an effective vaccine was deployed. As Grant replied to your comment, we saw overseas health systems were that happened overwhelmed - more than a million deaths in the US! Even with the lockdowns here in Australia, the pandemic was so stressful for hospital staff that many nurses left the profession. One shudders to think what would have happened without the lockdowns and vaccine. And that's my last word in this thread.
I'm no anti-vaxxer but I "thank" you for your judgement/categorisation rather than debating the issues.
I had 3 shots of the vaccine before realising it was a crock. I got COVID around 10 months after the last shot - if you analyse the vaccine it was not very effective at all - any aid it gave was gone within 3 months so when I got it there was no protection at all. And for me it was not even as bad as the mildest of colds. I'd like it if you could cite the data you produce. I too recall the media experts saying Covid was an illness of the unvaccinated but that was propaganda - the reality was otherwise. The 0.84% reduction number I cited was the results of the original Pfizer trials.
Like you Malcolm, I had three shots before I realised the vaccine was a crock. Within a fortnight I had four classic covid symptoms, a thumping heart (when I was resting after lunch), a brain fade, and chest tightness, along with a painful shoulder. Happily none of these except the shoulder pain lasted more than several minutes. I had experienced nothing like that before nor have I since.
I wonder if your conclusion mirrors mine? The research I have gathered since tells me that the vaccine was worse than useless, that people recovered in spite of any medical treatment they received, and had doctors been allowed to use their learned skills and use the drugs that were available, it would likely have been found similar to a light flu, as you say.
My personal experience is that doctors and individuals who used the drugs that NZ Health had quickly banned, recovered within a few days.
Unsurprisingly after five years, there is now a huge body of research on both covid19 and the vaccines. Sadly, much of it suggests that the vaccine was often the cause of sickness, and of death. It is very clear from hospital waiting lists that we are a far sicker people today than we were before 2020.
Indeed, we had seen health systems overloaded in other countries, so something had to be done. As it turned out, I think, the ICUs weren't overloaded in NZ.
The inflation we had was surely largely imported via supply chain collapse and corporate price gouging. Although some do argue that it lasted longer here because of the support to businesses and wages during the lockdowns and from the other stimulatory spending at the time. Pretty clear that it feed into house price inflation though.
And the future costs - well how does that really matter when we are a currency issuer, not a currency user?
Grant, you write: "Younger generations will continue to pay off the debts arising from sacrifices made collectively to keep maybe a few thousand elderly people alive for a few years longer." You seem to suggest that the people who died, about 3000, were the people who were kept 'alive for a few years earlier'. But the money was spent for the people who didn't die, so they wouldn't die. Michael Baker and colleagues, in the NZMJ in 2023, estimated lives saved here compared to death rates in the US were about 20,000. Yes, they would have been mainly older people, they would also have been disproportionately Māori and Pacific - which doesn't show in the crude numbers because they are younger populations. Perhaps you were referring to these 20,000 but it wasn't clear to me.
Hi Charlotte. I'm not able to estimate what would have happened if things had been done differently. My question really is a political one: would there be the same kind of cross-party approval and public consent and compliance in similar circumstances in future? It's not looking like there would be at the moment. The reasons for that are to do with humans, not viruses. Cheers.
As Grant says the estimates of saving 20,000 lives is exactly that; an estimate by people with a vested interest in what was the status quo - i.e. justifying themselves. Religion was like that back in the middle ages too.
I am a scientist myself and the first thing about an estimate is what were its assumptions? I tried to find out when that research came out but it was not freely available (i.e. you had to pay for it which I was not prepared to). I imagine it was in relation to some (worst case) do nothing scenario. That is the problem with all the self justifiers - they pretend the only alternative to what was done was to do nothing. There are so many ways focused protection could have been laser focused on those who really were vulnerable I am confident we could have done comparably at a fraction of the cost.
So don't pretend Michael Baker and colleagues estimates are "objective truth" and if you are going to cite it at least understand the assumptions in their models. Without knowing this it is not science but religion.
Malcolm, perhaps the point I didn't make clearly enough was that, even if Prof Baker's estimate of "lives saved" were more or less valid (and I'm not convinced a comparison with US is valid), it isn't a conversation-stopper. If a future government wanted to raise tens of billions for a similar effort, I'd expect to hear about "quality-adjusted life-years" including economic losses, and opportunity costs (other options for "saving lives" that may be equally or more cost-effective for taxpayer's money). The Covid experience is a chance for us to reflect on those things, without blame (I hope). After all, we're all paying for this, one way or another!
The point was well made. The conversation is what's important to keep on with. I apologise if my frustration may have shown through with people who it seems to me justify the status quo rather than critically evaluating things to see how we could do better. There is always room for a great deal of improvement...
Professor Skegg, Chair of the Strategic COVID-19 Public Health Advisory Group, 2021-2022 knew covid was shaving a few months off the lives of sick aged people, because I emailed him the UK government covid death stats and implored him to stop the covid spending madness.
Ardern and co knew their lockdowns were killing more people than they were saving because the productivity commission paper told them so, soon after the first lockdown ended.
So why did these "leaders" continue bankrupting nz, using failed techniques to manage a bad seasonal flu?
We need a forensic audit of the $74.4b covid spend to find out who got our money.
The Ardern Govt's COVID response wasn't problem free, but sitting back and letting Social Darwinist herd immunity rip would have been far worse. Especially since that approach tanked the regimes of Trump I and Bolsonaro. COVID also exposed the global over-reliance on low-cost Chinese industry.
If anyone's seen "Blame" at DocEdge, the lies and conspiracy theories about COVID's origins still cast a shadow over future pandemic responses.
Sweden followed a similar pandemic plan to the prepared nz pandemic plan the ardern hierarchy discarded.
Sweden's common sense approach resulted in the lowest covid death rate In scandanavia.
The Swedes aren't dying today because Sweden ruined their economy and can't afford basic health care.
Meanwhile over to nz....
"In 2024, Ministry of Health data showed New Zealand had 173.2 full-time cardiologists, or 32.8 per million, well below the European average of 95 per million. Auckland was the only region close to that benchmark."
I didn't vote because any analysis several years on is very likely to downplay the uncertainty during the pandemic years. We didn't know who the virus might kill - how many, and the age breakdown - while the vaccine came earlier than expected, but turned out to be less effective than hoped. No-one could predict the future.
That's true, thanks Claire. Do we learn anything for the next time from this experience? Taiwan, for instance, had learned a thing or two and were quick to put it into practice in Jan 2020.
I think this is a little disingenuous IMO, especially the line that "Māori and Pacific peoples are not over-represented in the stats for deaths caused by Covid" - when you look at the 0-59yo deaths, they are as high as Pākehā, despite their much lower overall % population (although their populations are younger), and it ignores the fact that both peoples have significantly lower life expectancies and higher vulnerabilities than Pākehā.
Also, at the time, as you point out, nobody knew just how bad the human toll would be, nor did we know that vaccines could be developed as fast as they could (likely not to happen in the future, with the Trump regime killing mRNA research). I am certainly grateful for the incredibly strong and science-backed response our government had - and because I work internationally, I could see daily just how enormously different our lifestyles were here compared with the horrors other countries had to deal with. Human psychology means we all forgot those horrors and the nuances of how uncertain those times were, and just remember the personal inconveniences.
That said, I agree with both, that we need to be better prepared for future pandemics, and should put a significant portion of our cash reserves into our health system, including cardiovascular health (and prevention). But that should also include a discussion to get rid of the idiotic 30/30 rule Bernard Hickey keeps highlighting as screwing our country, under both major party rules...
It surprises me how the results appear to suggest ~50/50 either side of this issue.
I wonder how people think spending $66B was worth it - suggests to me those who think it was haven't really thought much about it and are falling back to their own self defence (i.e. not prepared to re-evaluate their previous position). For me here's some reasons I don't think it was worth it:
1) It was and is clear the overwhelming majority of deaths were in the 80+ bracket and yet we shut down all of society. Wildly we shut schools, all workplaces etc even though children and working age people had little to fear. i.e. we could have spent a fraction to protect the known vulnerable while letting the rest of us keep life, society and the economy going
2) Given a total of 2900 lives lost thats $22M/life lost. That's not lives saved of course but...
3) Given the age distribution of deaths you can also work out the cost for each (expected) year of life saved. Doing that simple calculation comes out to $5M/year of life lost.
Some will argue that without the measures a lot more people would have died but the alternative to what occurred is not NO measures, but targeted protection. It's hard not to think we could have put in targeted measures around the aged and vulnerable more effectively and for far less effort/cost that would have worked just as well, if not better.
Instead the government used the sledgehammer approach, assumed elimination was a viable strategy in the medium/long term, and locked us all down. The elimination strategy was an idealistic and illusory goal that is what caused so much damage IMO.
As well as saving lives of the elderly (and some younger people), remember that the lockdowns saved the hospital system from burnout through trying (and often failing) to save so many dying people. So that was an important reason on the side of strict lockdowns - not just lifesaving. And not filling the hospitals with Covid sufferers allowed many surgery queues and treatment queues to continue moving, to the benefit of not just the old. But I haven’t answered your 2 quizzes, as I don’t feel I know enough to decide. I’m glad I didn’t have to make those decisions and wear the political consequences! Though I’m often frustrated with our political leaders, I acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of their role.
Thanks, Kai. I do recall that traffic fatalities dropped dramatically during the first lockdown. Unfortunately, I'm finding that it's not possible to separate a rational post-facto evaluation (so that we do it better next time) from people's will to defend or blame those in office at the time who, as you point put, were having to make the decisions without full knowledge. It's exacerbated over here at the moment by those same leaders choosing not to appear before public hearings of the Royal Commission.
You sure about that. I read many waiting lists got bigger over covid. Fear of spreading infection
As a personal anecdote, Richard, I had one minor procedure cancelled "because of Covid". I got better anyway, but I'm sure there are other stories of the kind.
See my response to Richard's comment, if the system hasn't alerted you to it.
My point is that the disruption to the health system would have been much greater - would perhaps have done irreparable damage - without the lockdowns. Certainly there was some disruption from the pandemic anyway.
I'm not so sure about that. It's an assumption that the impact on the health system would have been much greater. Sure there would have been more Covid around if NZ didn't follow an elimination strategy but there are two factors to consider:
1) Had the government put most of their resources into targeted protection it is quite possible the serious illness (of the vulnerable) could actually have been reduced.
2) There's an assumption on most people's part that the vaccine once it arrived made a big difference but you should note it neither stopped the catching of or spread. Right from the start it only reduced absolute incidence by 0.84% which is pretty marginal really and when you read the medical statements that it "reduced severe illness" that only applies to the those that actually had sever illness. i.e. It is not correct to think that it reduced severity in the general population.
On top of this there was a whole lot of hysteria that both the health sector partook in that reduced its own effectiveness at the time and the general population being scared that having Covid warranted going to hospital.
It sounds as though you're an anti-vaxxer. Once the vaccine was in use here in Australia, pretty much all the severe cases needing hospitalisation here in Australia (about 95% of them, as I recall) were the unvaccinated - and these included even young people and children. Think about it - think about what would have happened if the virus had been allowed to spread unchecked through the general population before an effective vaccine was deployed. As Grant replied to your comment, we saw overseas health systems were that happened overwhelmed - more than a million deaths in the US! Even with the lockdowns here in Australia, the pandemic was so stressful for hospital staff that many nurses left the profession. One shudders to think what would have happened without the lockdowns and vaccine. And that's my last word in this thread.
I'm no anti-vaxxer but I "thank" you for your judgement/categorisation rather than debating the issues.
I had 3 shots of the vaccine before realising it was a crock. I got COVID around 10 months after the last shot - if you analyse the vaccine it was not very effective at all - any aid it gave was gone within 3 months so when I got it there was no protection at all. And for me it was not even as bad as the mildest of colds. I'd like it if you could cite the data you produce. I too recall the media experts saying Covid was an illness of the unvaccinated but that was propaganda - the reality was otherwise. The 0.84% reduction number I cited was the results of the original Pfizer trials.
Like you Malcolm, I had three shots before I realised the vaccine was a crock. Within a fortnight I had four classic covid symptoms, a thumping heart (when I was resting after lunch), a brain fade, and chest tightness, along with a painful shoulder. Happily none of these except the shoulder pain lasted more than several minutes. I had experienced nothing like that before nor have I since.
I wonder if your conclusion mirrors mine? The research I have gathered since tells me that the vaccine was worse than useless, that people recovered in spite of any medical treatment they received, and had doctors been allowed to use their learned skills and use the drugs that were available, it would likely have been found similar to a light flu, as you say.
My personal experience is that doctors and individuals who used the drugs that NZ Health had quickly banned, recovered within a few days.
Unsurprisingly after five years, there is now a huge body of research on both covid19 and the vaccines. Sadly, much of it suggests that the vaccine was often the cause of sickness, and of death. It is very clear from hospital waiting lists that we are a far sicker people today than we were before 2020.
Fair enough that's your opinion and I think otherwise but neither of us has any data or reasoning etc to be sure
Indeed, we had seen health systems overloaded in other countries, so something had to be done. As it turned out, I think, the ICUs weren't overloaded in NZ.
See my response to Richard's last comment in reply to mine.
The inflation we had was surely largely imported via supply chain collapse and corporate price gouging. Although some do argue that it lasted longer here because of the support to businesses and wages during the lockdowns and from the other stimulatory spending at the time. Pretty clear that it feed into house price inflation though.
And the future costs - well how does that really matter when we are a currency issuer, not a currency user?
What matters, I argue, is that the country have an open debate about it all.
Grant, you write: "Younger generations will continue to pay off the debts arising from sacrifices made collectively to keep maybe a few thousand elderly people alive for a few years longer." You seem to suggest that the people who died, about 3000, were the people who were kept 'alive for a few years earlier'. But the money was spent for the people who didn't die, so they wouldn't die. Michael Baker and colleagues, in the NZMJ in 2023, estimated lives saved here compared to death rates in the US were about 20,000. Yes, they would have been mainly older people, they would also have been disproportionately Māori and Pacific - which doesn't show in the crude numbers because they are younger populations. Perhaps you were referring to these 20,000 but it wasn't clear to me.
Hi Charlotte. I'm not able to estimate what would have happened if things had been done differently. My question really is a political one: would there be the same kind of cross-party approval and public consent and compliance in similar circumstances in future? It's not looking like there would be at the moment. The reasons for that are to do with humans, not viruses. Cheers.
As Grant says the estimates of saving 20,000 lives is exactly that; an estimate by people with a vested interest in what was the status quo - i.e. justifying themselves. Religion was like that back in the middle ages too.
I am a scientist myself and the first thing about an estimate is what were its assumptions? I tried to find out when that research came out but it was not freely available (i.e. you had to pay for it which I was not prepared to). I imagine it was in relation to some (worst case) do nothing scenario. That is the problem with all the self justifiers - they pretend the only alternative to what was done was to do nothing. There are so many ways focused protection could have been laser focused on those who really were vulnerable I am confident we could have done comparably at a fraction of the cost.
So don't pretend Michael Baker and colleagues estimates are "objective truth" and if you are going to cite it at least understand the assumptions in their models. Without knowing this it is not science but religion.
Malcolm, perhaps the point I didn't make clearly enough was that, even if Prof Baker's estimate of "lives saved" were more or less valid (and I'm not convinced a comparison with US is valid), it isn't a conversation-stopper. If a future government wanted to raise tens of billions for a similar effort, I'd expect to hear about "quality-adjusted life-years" including economic losses, and opportunity costs (other options for "saving lives" that may be equally or more cost-effective for taxpayer's money). The Covid experience is a chance for us to reflect on those things, without blame (I hope). After all, we're all paying for this, one way or another!
The point was well made. The conversation is what's important to keep on with. I apologise if my frustration may have shown through with people who it seems to me justify the status quo rather than critically evaluating things to see how we could do better. There is always room for a great deal of improvement...
Professor Skegg, Chair of the Strategic COVID-19 Public Health Advisory Group, 2021-2022 knew covid was shaving a few months off the lives of sick aged people, because I emailed him the UK government covid death stats and implored him to stop the covid spending madness.
Ardern and co knew their lockdowns were killing more people than they were saving because the productivity commission paper told them so, soon after the first lockdown ended.
So why did these "leaders" continue bankrupting nz, using failed techniques to manage a bad seasonal flu?
We need a forensic audit of the $74.4b covid spend to find out who got our money.
The Ardern Govt's COVID response wasn't problem free, but sitting back and letting Social Darwinist herd immunity rip would have been far worse. Especially since that approach tanked the regimes of Trump I and Bolsonaro. COVID also exposed the global over-reliance on low-cost Chinese industry.
If anyone's seen "Blame" at DocEdge, the lies and conspiracy theories about COVID's origins still cast a shadow over future pandemic responses.
Sweden followed a similar pandemic plan to the prepared nz pandemic plan the ardern hierarchy discarded.
Sweden's common sense approach resulted in the lowest covid death rate In scandanavia.
The Swedes aren't dying today because Sweden ruined their economy and can't afford basic health care.
Meanwhile over to nz....
"In 2024, Ministry of Health data showed New Zealand had 173.2 full-time cardiologists, or 32.8 per million, well below the European average of 95 per million. Auckland was the only region close to that benchmark."
I didn't vote because any analysis several years on is very likely to downplay the uncertainty during the pandemic years. We didn't know who the virus might kill - how many, and the age breakdown - while the vaccine came earlier than expected, but turned out to be less effective than hoped. No-one could predict the future.
That's true, thanks Claire. Do we learn anything for the next time from this experience? Taiwan, for instance, had learned a thing or two and were quick to put it into practice in Jan 2020.
Bravo Grant. This is one of your very best opinion pieces.
Asking readers' tight questions preceded by brief, good preparatory information.
And providing first class appropriate statistics.
Thank you for the kind comment, Peter!