Covid-19: here’s why British critics of Jacinda Ardern are wrong

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OPINION: British columnist Matthew Lesh, writing in The Telegraph, claimed Jacinda Ardern was trapped in her “arrogant Zero Covid policy.

Unfortunately, the claim is devoid of accuracy and demonstrates a lack of proper research, which is ironic given that the author is the head of research at the Adam Smith Institute.

Rosa Woods / Stuff

University of Otago public health professor Michael Baker was part of the group that advised the government on the coronavirus.

To send back his offensive opening sentence, there is no poetic justice in his article for the honest intellectual Smith was.

Lesh acknowledges that New Zealand’s economic growth has been high and mortality low during the pandemic, but downplays the importance as if this is just a 2020 phenomenon.

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First, thanks to its elimination strategy, New Zealand has one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the world, 5 deaths per million.

Compare that with the UK’s 1,961 deaths per million (August 20). If we had followed the British more laissez-faire approach, we could have had over 10,000 deaths instead of 26. The last Covid-19 death in New Zealand was in February 2021.

Second, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ranked New Zealand as the best performing member country for its response to Covid-19, including its economic performance.

Provided

Ian Powell, former executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS).

And third, New Zealand’s elimination strategy has given us one of the highest levels of no lockdown in the OECD in the past 18 months, based on the Oxford Stringency Index and from the Economist Magazines Normalcy Index.

Lesh is misleading in his description of New Zealand following a zero Covid strategy. In fact, our elimination strategy with a focus on community transmission is more practical than that. He acknowledges that we might not keep the virus out of the country all the time but, if we do get an outbreak, we will eradicate it quickly in order to protect the public.

This is why New Zealand entered a national lockdown as soon as we detected the start of our first Delta variant Covid-19 outbreak on August 17.

Genomic tests have shown the virus was introduced from New South Wales by an infected traveler who arrived on August 7. The virus had not been circulating for a few weeks in New Zealand.

Lesh is wrong to claim that Australia has seen an increase in the number of daily cases despite severe and ongoing lockdowns. Thanks to quick and strong lockdowns, outbreaks of Delta variants were largely eliminated in the states of Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia as well as in the Northern Territory (Tasmania was successful in l ‘completely prevent).

Lisa Maree Williams / Getty Images

SNSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian speaks in a Covid-19 update and press conference on July 26.

Cases are increasing, dangerously, in New South Wales but, despite protests to the contrary from its Prime Minister, it is because of the slow response and the very loose lockdown allowing the virus to continue to spread. Severe lockdowns have worked in Australia; cowards don’t.

Using our low vaccination rate to pretend Prime Minister Ardern has little serious interest in protecting New Zealanders is dishonest. Our vaccination rates are dictated by the vaccine supply which has been difficult to control. As a small OECD economy, we have less bargaining power than much larger economies and countries like the UK that are producers of vaccines.

In fact, we are comparable to Australia’s much larger economy and by the end of this year every adult New Zealander should have the opportunity to be fully immunized.

Moreover, the very rapid national lockdown now underway is hardly the behavior of a Prime Minister who has little serious interest in protecting New Zealanders.

Lesh says New Zealand’s vaccination centers have been closed due to the lockdown. It is dishonest. Recognizing that our workforce capacities would be overburdened, the government suspended vaccination for a day to allow essential testing centers to start up and operate. Now we have both vaccines and tests for Delta increasing simultaneously.

Once the population is fully immunized by the end of 2021 and we know more about the implications of different policy options, New Zealand will be in a good position to make an informed choice on whether to pursue a strategy of elimination or switching to a more flexible approach to removal if this seems optimal. . Until then, we hope the country can continue to keep its options open.

When Adam Smith advocated his invisible hand in market economies, we don’t think he envisioned objectivity and empirical evidence being thrown out the window as a result of the way Lesh did it.

Ian Powell, former executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, and Michael Baker, professor of public health, University of Otago, Wellington,

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