Ireland vs New Zealand

wakka12

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote: »

Comparing the population density is pointless, something like 83% of New Zealanders live in urban areas, with more than half of the urban population living in the 4 biggest cities of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton. Those cities are all well interconnected, and Kiwis do a lot of travelling around the country, both for business and recreation. Every reasonably large town has an airport.

NZ obviously had an advantage from the start with it's relative remoteness from large populations and the fact that they closed the borders very early on. What they've also done was put in place one of the tightest lockdowns in the world, announcing Alert Level 4 on 23rd March, at which stage there were still only 102 cases in the country and nobody had died. Level 4 meant absolutely everything was closed apart from Supermarkets and Pharmacies and people were effectively on 23 hour lockdown apart from being allowed out to exercise or buy food.

We've gone down to Level 3 from today, which just means that restaurants and cafes can now serve food and beverage for takeaway or delivery only (people still aren't allowed inside the store, and it must be done contactlessly).

Jacinda Ardern said it was important to "go hard and go early" and that's exactly what happened here. The economy will suffer the same as anywhere else, but they got the major calls right and I will say one thing for the Kiwi public, they by and large adhered to it extremely vigilantly.

POpulation density of an entire country is pointless as you have completely remote areas inflating the figure for how spread out the population is if most people live in cities

But comparing the population density of urban areas between countries is extremely relevant

RandomName2

Gidea wrote: »

and the fact that europe is an epicentre of the disease

The epicenter of the disease is China. It occurred in Wuhan in December 2019 and grew exponentially. Any country that subsequently got infected either had to get it from China, or got it from a country that got it from China.

Europe wanted to protect business so put no restrictions on movement to China. It did not have any contingency plans for epidemics. It did not have face masks. It had populations that considered any preventative measures to be hysterical.

Asia was where this occurred. Not Europe. The fact that Europe and America have become badly effected has nothing to do with the epicenter of the disease.

All it takes is one case and a country that does not care.

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater

wakka12 wrote: »

But comparing the population density of urban areas between countries is extremely relevant

That's fair to a point, but I think that's more a comparison you should be making for somewhere like New York rather than Dublin v Auckland which are both low density cities with sprawling suburbs.

Gidea

RandomName2 wrote: »

The epicenter of the disease is China. It occurred in Wuhan in December 2019 and grew exponentially. Any country that subsequently got infected either had to get it from China, or got it from a country that got it from China.

Europe wanted to protect business so put no restrictions on movement to China. It did not have any contingency plans for epidemics. It did not have face masks. It had populations that considered any preventative measures to be hysterical.

Asia was where this occurred. Not Europe. The fact that Europe and America have become badly effected has nothing to do with the epicenter of the disease.

All it takes is one case and a country that does not care.

Epicenter does not mean origin.

plodder

I liked this idea of having distinct alert levels which shows, or at least appears to show a plan that they had in advance. I think that would have been a good idea on the way into this. Maybe less so on the way out of it, where maximum flexibility will be needed to get the most effect out of the restrictions are still in place.

Xertz

RandomName2 wrote: »

They could have just quarantined anybody coming into the country for two weeks. That's it.

If that was too extreme, you could decide to quarantine only people coming into the country from regions with active outbreaks (e.g. northern Italy). A riskier approach but one that might have worked.

In the end they decided for a free-for-all and lockdown when the inevitable happened. Inevitable? Inevitable because anybody with hands can use the internet and see what had already happened in both Italy and China. This is the reason I didn't excuse Boris Johnson being mislead by advisors, because you could just look up the news. Trump doesn't get a by on his medical knowledge just because he hasn't been specifically briefed on how bleach works.

Now the example of New Zealand is clear as day, and posters in this thread are hostile to the comparison because New Zealand is three times as big as Ireland. Perhaps a more comprehensive assessment is merited.

Quarantined them where exactly?

In normal times there are roughly 51,900 people arriving at Dublin, Cork, Shannon and the other airports every day.

I guess you could put them into tent cities at the Curragh?

They were asked to self isolate early on, I hope most did.

Richard Hillman

It is a nonsense comparison. They are on the edge of the world.

If you want to use comparisons then use European countries of similar size. Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Rep, Hungary, Portugal, Finland, Denmark etc.

And yes, we have done terribly compared to them. The NZ comparison is unhelpful and doesn't help debunk the Irish media consensus of that we've played a blinder.

mandrake04

manlad wrote: »

Eh social distancing???

Thanks I’m just interested in you way of thinking, so I assume your thinking the lower the density the more advantageous?

wakka12

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote: »

That's fair to a point, but I think that's more a comparison you should be making for somewhere like New York rather than Dublin v Auckland which are both low density cities with sprawling suburbs.

I think it still makes a difference though, Dublin in a lot of the city is 2-3 story terraces, and semi d's. Auckland, is all detached one story. It's incredibly low density even compared to Dublin

Dublin also has much more people in the residential core, tenement flat shares. Auckland's centre is just commercial and office

the_syco

RandomName2 wrote: »

Both are islands that are sparsely populated. New Zealand is significantly larger and thus more sparsely populated.

People from Ireland went to Italy for skiing in Jan & Feb. Italy had deaths similar to COVID19 before China told the world about COVID19.

New Zealand has it's own snow in August, so people there don't need to fly abroad to go skiing.

RandomName2

Gidea wrote: »

Epicenter does not mean origin.

It doesn't, but when 99% of the world's cases were in Wuhan until the middle of February I think it's pretty safe to say that not only was it the origin, it was the epicenter too.

Now the highest number of cases in the world is in America, but since it became a pandemic talking about epicenters is a bit redundant.

the_syco wrote: »

Italy had deaths similar to COVID19 before China told the world about COVID19.

Everything that I read has pointed to patient zero traveling into Lombardy, from Germany, at the end of January.

RandomName2

Xertz wrote: »

Quarantined them where exactly?

In normal times there are roughly 51,900 people arriving at Dublin, Cork, Shannon and the other airports every day.

I guess you could put them into tent cities at the Curragh?

If locking down the country was possible then it was possible to provide for the quarantining of people coming from COVID-19 regions. Are you genuinely saying that nothing more than a leaflet stand was possible? You know what country quarantines people for two weeks? New Zealand. You know what country has less than 20 deaths? Yes, you guessed it, New Zealand.

Xertz wrote: »

They were asked to self isolate early on, I hope most did.

No, they weren't. They were told to go about their normal lives unless they developed symptoms. As I said, policy of spreading the disease liberally.. quite successfully.

Xertz

wakka12 wrote: »

Auckland council area population density
1200 km2

Dublin county pop density

4588 km2

Dublin City Council only covers the older (numbered) urban areas of Dublin City taking in 114.99 km2.

Auckland Council is a large regional authority that came about from a local authorities mergers project, and covers 4,894 km2, an area roughly the size of Dublin and several surrounding counties.

The project itself was considered somewhat controversial, and was also the model used to support the city/county council mergers here.

The argument made in Ireland (and by European commentators generally) was that they merged a dense urban area with a sparsely populated rural area - the net result of which is not a 'super city' but a big messy authority that's neither urban nor rural.

Perhaps in NZ there's more a collection of small, defined towns and cities in an agglomeration, but in the Irish context it would have meant merging, for example, Cork City with a rural area that's nearly half the size of Northern Ireland and has nothing much in common with it, other than the word Cork. So policies would have been inappropriate for the city and the county. The jury's still out on whether it was a good idea in Waterford and Limerick, particularly as those cities sat on the edge of county lines. E.g. Limerick is now a unitary council, but Limerick City straddles the border of Clare, which isn't merged into it.

Anyway, comparing Dublin City Council and Auckland Council is a bit like comparing Dublin City Council to East Leinster.

Making direct comparisons between Ireland and NZ isn't always a great idea as beyond the look of the landscape (especially the north of South Island), the similarities stop. Ireland's very much an old European country with development patterns that reflect its history and New Zealand is a 'new world' country that was colonised quite rapidly and recently, so things tend to reflect mostly 20th century planning.

The population of NZ in 1800 was 120,000 vs Ireland at the same time was almost 6 million.
By 1920 New Zealand was only a little over 1 million and growing rapidly.

So basically you're looking at a remote, "new world" country that developed largely in the 20th century and a very proximate part of Europe "old world" country that has development patterns that reflect centuries of agrarian society, 19th and 20th century urbanisation, and also even impacts of a massive famine in the 19th century.

It's just not like-with-like at all, beyond the superficial stuff.

hmmm

New Zealand also doesn't share a land border with a country which had decided to on a strategy of herd immunity early in the epidemic.

mandrake04

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote: »

Comparing the population density is pointless, something like 83% of New Zealanders live in urban areas, with more than half of the urban population living in the 4 biggest cities of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton. Those cities are all well interconnected, and Kiwis do a lot of travelling around the country, both for business and recreation. Every reasonably large town has an airport. .

Actually if you check 87% of the population live in urban areas, 73% (3.5m) live in main urban areas which is 1.9% of the land mass of NZ

That land mass is believe it or not is 25% the size of Leinster.

Xertz

hmmm wrote: »

New Zealand also doesn't share a land border with a country which had decided to on a strategy of herd immunity early in the epidemic.

Apart from Northern Ireland, the border between Britain and Ireland is as permeable as the border between NZ's North and South Islands.

Also, even if we could practically close off Northern Ireland's land border, the political implications of that are rather uniquely difficult and could result in things like border guards / customs / health officials being targeted by paramilitaries.

That isn't a situation that exists between very many countries to be quite honest.

Also the level of interconnectedness across that border is profound. So, unlike say US-Canada, you can't really just close it down without having all sorts of implications for things like shopping, education, healthcare etc etc.

There are a LOT of similarities between Ireland and New Zealand across many areas and they are quite familiar looking societies from each other's point of view (and increasingly so) but on this topic it's geography that's the key factor.

You're comparing an Irish apple and a Kiwi fruit. They're both round and fruit. They both taste pretty good, but beyond that there are a lot of fundamental differences.

Laois_Man

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote: »

Comparing the population density is pointless, something like 83% of New Zealanders live in urban areas, with more than half of the urban population living in the 4 biggest cities of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton. Those cities are all well interconnected, and Kiwis do a lot of travelling around the country, both for business and recreation. Every reasonably large town has an airport.

NZ obviously had an advantage from the start with it's relative remoteness from large populations and the fact that they closed the borders very early on. What they've also done was put in place one of the tightest lockdowns in the world, announcing Alert Level 4 on 23rd March, at which stage there were still only 102 cases in the country and nobody had died. Level 4 meant absolutely everything was closed apart from Supermarkets and Pharmacies and people were effectively on 23 hour lockdown apart from being allowed out to exercise or buy food.

We've gone down to Level 3 from today, which just means that restaurants and cafes can now serve food and beverage for takeaway or delivery only (people still aren't allowed inside the store, and it must be done contactlessly).

Jacinda Ardern said it was important to "go hard and go early" and that's exactly what happened here. The economy will suffer the same as anywhere else, but they got the major calls right and I will say one thing for the Kiwi public, they by and large adhered to it extremely vigilantly.

The highlighted bit is the only thing NZ did differently to Ireland. But they have an advantage there too. Being part of the European Union means we were/are probably legally unable to close our borders - we've signed up to free movement - not free movement unless there's a pandemic or some other time we don't feel like it. We can't even close our borders to Northern Ireland without creating the very thing we've been taking the moral high-ground on against the Brits for the last 4-years...a hard border.

Xertz

Laois_Man wrote: »

The highlighted bit is the only thing NZ did differently to Ireland. But they have an advantage there too. Being part of the European Union means we were/are probably legally unable to close our borders - we've signed up to free movement - not free movement unless there's a pandemic or some other time we don't feel like it. We can't even close our borders to Northern Ireland without creating the very thing we've been taking the moral high-ground on against the Brits for the last 4-years...a hard border.

To be fair to the EU on this, they don't and didn't have any particular problem with countries closing borders to movement of people, as long as they kept them open for movement of goods to prevent market disruption and potentially serious social/economic consequences like loss of food, medicine or essential goods supplies.

Almost all of the EU's rules are circumscribed by rights for member states to roll back on key aspects in situations like this and with scenarios exactly like this in mind.

What the EU did have a major issue with was countries taking knee jerk reactions in a totally uncoordinated way, which resulted for a few days in disruption of goods and could have turned into a major problem very quickly, but was solved quite fast by the European Commission coming up with those green-lanes that allowed rapid movement of goods across closed borders and that's been bolstered with improved support for supply chains.

Also Ireland is not in the Schengen area, and does not offer passport free / check free travel to/from the rest of the EU and never has.

The big issue for us was the Common Travel Area and the fact that it's effectively entirely open. We actually implement checks at airports (inbound only) while the UK tends not to bother checking Irish outbound passengers at all, unless there's some kind of security issue going on.

That's a border that doesn't require any form of ID and we have no concept of national ID cards or anything like that in either jurisdiction. Any ID we have is entirely optional.

Also the land border with Northern Ireland simply does not exist in any shape or form. There's no physical presence at all and it's hugely controversial.

In theory you could, if it weren't for the DUP being so impractical, lock down the entire island for health reasons and have a common island-wide border control but trying to get agreement on that with the loopers politics up North is more or less impossible as it would be absolutely bogged down in identity politics up there. You would immediately and without any doubt have a conspiracy that this was all about "Dublin" trying to create a united Ireland by stealth. We all know how paranoid the DUP in particular is about that topic and it's played out around Brexit, where they turned down a deal that could have been a massive boon to the Northern Ireland economy, giving it a special status in the UK and EU simultaneously because they do not want to be treated any differently to the rest of the UK

On this one, you can only really blame the unique set of circumstances that exist within the CTA and they come about due to Irish-British historical relationships, not because of the EU.

RandomName2

hmmm wrote: »

New Zealand also doesn't share a land border with a country which had decided to on a strategy of herd immunity early in the epidemic.

While that is true it doesn't seem to have made any real impact to date. Irish policy was not informed by Whitehall's strategy and Ireland was infected, as was expected, by people returning from vacation in northern Italy.

mandrake04

RandomName2 wrote: »

While that is true it doesn't seem to have made any real impact to date. Irish policy was not informed by Whitehall's strategy and Ireland was infected, as was expected, by people returning from vacation in northern Italy.

I would say most of the cases came from the 4000 Italian Rugby fans and a lot from Cheltenham.

ThunbergsAreGo

RandomName2 wrote: »

I don't think you are going to get many countries that are more similar to each other than Ireland and New Zealand. Go ahead, name a country. Give it a shot. Name a country more similar than Ireland and New Zealand.

The UK

hmmm

mandrake04 wrote: »

I would say most of the cases came from the 4000 Italian Rugby fans and a lot from Cheltenham.

There isn't much evidence of this. Most of our early clusters could be traced back to travel by Irish people.

It seems like a million years ago, but people are forgetting how quickly this developed in Europe. The cases in Italy seemed contained, and a handful were reported in Milan with most of the ski resorts having very few cases.

In hindsight this was wrong, but we are only discovering this now - the ski resorts were basically riddled with virus. The Italian ski resort of Ischgl seems to have seeded half of Switzerland, and that's a country which generally has it's s**t together and got caught out.

Xertz

There are a lot of things everyone would have done differently, in hindsight, had they known that the virus was as widespread as it likely was and as contagious as it's subsequently proven to be.

Italy had a massive outbreak before it really understood what was about to hit it. The same applied to Spain and France.

I mean there are plenty of lessons everyone can learn from both the positives and negatives of everyone else's responses.

There are things we could learn from NZ, but its geographical location isn't one of them.

Alun

hmmm wrote: »

The Italian ski resort of Ischgl seems to have seeded half of Switzerland, and that's a country which generally has it's s**t together and got caught out.

Ischgl is in Austria, not that far from the Swiss border.

Gretas Gonna Get Ya!

Xertz wrote: »

There are a lot of things everyone would have done differently, in hindsight, had they known that the virus was as widespread as it likely was and as contagious as it's subsequently proven to be.

Italy had a massive outbreak before it really understood what was about to hit it. The same applied to Spain and France.

I mean there are plenty of lessons everyone can learn from both the positives and negatives of everyone else's responses.

There are things we could learn from NZ, but its geographical location isn't one of them.

But if you want to save lives, you have to try and learn some of those lessons in real time... not 5 years afterwards when you do a crisis management review.

And there were things we could have taken on board, to lessen the impact on our country... but we didn't.

Even now, our government is just straight up refusing to take a position on something like face masks... even though other countries have taken a strong position on them. We're just sitting there, not sure what to do!

So the argument that everything is in hindsight, is very much wrong... there is and was plenty that could be learned and implemented in the present. We're just nowhere near proactive enough to act on these things.

hmmm

Gretas Gonna Get Ya! wrote: »

But if you want to save lives, you have to try and learn some of those lessons in real time... not 5 years afterwards when you do a crisis management review.

And there were things we could have taken on board, to lessen the impact on our country... but we didn't.

What does that even mean? "you have to try and learn some of those lessons in real time"

No-one realised the extent of the virus spread in Italian ski resorts. It's not real-time, it's the benefit of hindsight.

I don't think anyone wanted our government making decisions on a whim - they had to be guided by the public health experts who were dealing with a million sources of information and making decisions about a new virus.

Stateofyou

Maybe the key ingredient here is female leadership:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/#67fd66253dec

MadYaker

Dumb opening post. NZ were way behind us in terms of the development of the pandemic and they locked down much earlier.

But it’s an apples and oranges comparison.

Dravokivich

RandomName2 wrote: »

I think that if they had a large international rugby match against Italy and they cancelled it due to fears concerning the spread of COVID-19, they probably would have stopped the supporters from coming into the country or at least subjected them to two weeks quarantine.

Rugby doesn't have a particularly big following in Italy. How many people would have actually come over for it? I keep seeing references to thousands of'em on Boards. I've no idea where thousands of Italian rugby fans could have come from.

Richard Hillman

Dravokivich wrote: »

Rugby doesn't have a particularly big following in Italy. How many people would have actually come over for it? I keep seeing references to thousands of'em on Boards. I've no idea where thousands of Italian rugby fans could have come from.

A couple of thousand maybe. The big thing is that rugby's heart land in Italy is up north. Their 2 Pro14 Clubs come from Veneto and Emilia-Romagna which were both under lockdown a week or 2 before the game was due tó take place.