With Joe Biden declaring the pandemic ‘over’ and the last of our major restrictions lapsing, Duncan Greive pulls together some data to compare how Aotearoa’s Covid-19 management compared with some other notable countries.
It’s now been a week since the government elected to let its emergency laws expire, as good a marker as any for the move from pandemic to endemic Covid-19. Last week I wrote about the various profound impacts that linger even as the laws are gone, ending on a note suggesting that, on the whole, we should all be collectively proud of how we confronted this generation-defining challenge. That was by no means to suggest we managed it perfectly, but that we certainly did better than the dire assessment of our preparedness going in.
That’s not just a vibe – there’s data to back it up. I’ve picked eight charts that collectively tell the story of the pandemic through its impact on health and the economy and set us against a basket of similar developed nations to see how we managed. It’s necessarily limited, but illuminates something that it’s easy to forget as many of us return to a different basket of preoccupations: we did pretty damn well.
The point of this exercise is not to gloat – we had a number of very significant advantages, most notably geography. Instead it is to use this moment, the end of a period of highly unusual restrictions, to reflect on what they were for, what they accomplished and get a sense of how the health of our people and our economy survived versus some other nations to which we often compare ourselves.
These charts were generated from Our World in Data or created in Flourish by Ben Gracewood. Roll over individual countries to see them isolated from the pack.
This chart shows just how infectious the Omicron variant was, with all countries – even those that had lived with Covid-19 in the community since March of 2020 – peaking after it emerged. Of the six countries I picked for comparison, only Ireland ever experienced a higher number of cases per million. Yet our peak came latest, and our experience of Delta and other highly infectious variants was negligible compared to most. Crucially, a large majority of us were vaccinated, and many boosted, by the time Omicron really took hold.
This is perhaps the most stark illustration of what might have been had we not pursued the elimination strategy and kept up a very hard (some might say unnecessarily harsh) border regime. For the past few weeks we have, at times, had some of the highest death rates per million people in the world. However that’s only because Covid has essentially burned to embers in much of the rest of the world, and during those fearsome spikes and prolonged surges in other countries, New Zealand was completely Covid-free.
An underappreciated dividend of our isolation and lockdowns was a decrease in seasonal influenza and other viruses that tend to impact mortality (translation: kill people). The UK peaked at more than double its normal mortality, while even Australia, which also pursued elimination, was more often elevated above a zero baseline. By comparison New Zealand spent much of the pandemic era experiencing fewer deaths than it would have expected in an ordinary year.
One area in which there is a clear and valid critique of our response is vaccination. Today we sit resolutely in the middle of this pack, with slightly more than 80% of our population fully vaccinated. This is partially explained by having a younger population than some in the group – Singapore, for example, has a significantly older (and therefore more eligible) population. But Australia’s is roughly the same age as ours, and after a slow start it has been persistently ahead.
More significant is the lag in getting started in the first place. It wasn’t until July 2021 that we reached even 10% of the population, and due to a focus on older populations we lagged particularly in vaccinating Māori and Pacific communities, with gaps that proved difficult to close. That said, a huge effort over spring saw us surpass the US and UK, and while there are legitimate questions around how long we took to procure the vaccine, its ultimate impact is manifest in the charts above.
There is something of a paradox in our lockdowns, in that they were some of the strictest outside China, yet produced long periods in which our population was among the world’s least restricted (notwithstanding closed borders and restrictions on large events). The below map, which can be viewed as a video, illustrates that tension well. It shows while there has been considerable critique of the lockdowns from some quarters, not all of it without merit, when viewing the course of the pandemic as a whole our freedoms were not drastically more impacted than many other nations. The difference being, again, that we were much more likely to survive the pandemic.
For some the very idea of comparing health to economic data is odious. Unfortunately it’s something governments do every day, whether it’s deciding which stretch of dangerous road to upgrade, or whether to fund an expensive new cancer drug.
Setting that aside for a moral philosophy major to figure out, it’s worth looking at how New Zealand’s inflation is tracking versus some similar nations. There has been some noise that the combination of loose money from the Reserve Bank and big spending from the government produced a long-lasting (so far) inflationary bomb. And while that certainly has some truth to it, this chart shows that we are ultimately middle of the pack among similar nations, and significantly below the OECD average. We did what most other countries did, and that plus all the associated supply chain chaos produced similar results.
While inflation is bad, new research from the University of Auckland was picked up by the New York Times’ Peter Coy due to its challenging conclusion: unemployment is much, much worse. It was based on long-term data about people’s self-assessed happiness, and while it runs contra to many years of prevailing theory, the approach is compelling.
If you hold that view, the economic response to the pandemic looks pretty extraordinary. New Zealand had by far the lowest increase in unemployment – just 1.2% from trough to peak, versus the OECD average rise of more than 3%. It currently sits at 3.3%, close to full employment. This is actually a problem – labour shortages are currently much more commonly discussed than joblessness, which has essentially vanished – but it’s a much better problem than high unemployment.
Gross Domestic Product is the most commonly-cited measure of a country’s performance, a bundle of signals which collectively suggest how fast your economy is growing (or shrinking, as was often the case during the pandemic). These data are bumpy, and unlike the health impacts it will likely be years before we can confidently assess the pandemic’s long-term impact on countries. Early signs, though, are that New Zealand was pretty middle-of-the-pack, tracking the OECD average reasonably closely over the past couple of years. We spiked higher, exuberant from elimination, in 2020, then dipped more harshly when we endured a lengthy Delta lockdown in spring of 2021.
It suggests that by this crucial measure we basically did fine – neither great nor awful. Yet set it against the other seven charts and there is an overwhelming sense that the sum total of our efforts during the pandemic were easily among the world’s most successful.
As we move uneasily into what some are calling the post-pandemic era, it’s worth reflecting on that with a decent amount of satisfaction.
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