Our first lockdown, at its peak, was stricter than those in Australia, but it lasted a much shorter time. By May 14 we were at "alert level 2" which is mostly normal life, but most of Australia didn't reach a similar level for another month, because community cases kept bubbling up in Australia. It's far from obvious that Australia's approach was a win overall. Compare Australia with NZ here:
https://ourworldindata.org/cor...

Your argument that we should have "changed strategy" is also off base. It has never been clear that Australia was going to achieve elimination, and it certainly wasn't clear before we had already begun stepping down alert levels in NZ.

> If in the future the virus goes crazy in NZ killing thousands they will look like fools for wasting all that effort on elimination

Not at all. Whatever happens from here on, we will benefit from everything that has been learned worldwide about how to treat COVID19 over the last few months --- months where we have been enjoying normal life, unlike almost every other country.

> you might love being locked down but I do not.

Nobody loves being locked down. With our current strategy we should soon be able to get back to alert level 1.

Note that outside Auckland, NZ isn't having a "lockdown" according to many countries' definitions. E.g. Sweden officially has no lockdown but they don't allow gatherings of more than 50 people; outside Auckland under alert level 2 we can have gatherings of up to 100 people.

It looks like the BCG vaccine may reduce the severity of COVID19 but it by no means guarantees to reduce COVID19 to an "asymptomatic or a minor condition".
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...

"They're juicing up the COVID numbers" is a conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.

If you were able to do the experiment where somehow you persuade people to not change their behavior for the sake of the economy, you would find COVID19 killing a LOT more people as most people who need hospital care would die due to the hospitals being full.

And it turns out that killing a lot of people ALSO tanks the economy, so you lose again.

When hospitals get full of COVID19 patients, are forced to triage so only people with the best chance to live get ICU and the rest are sent home to die ... when they start packing bodies into refrigerated trucks ... people get scared and make drastic changes to their behavior, and the economy tanks.

With COVID19 that happened in NY and has been on the verge of happening in multiple US states, even *with* partial lockdowns. With no lockdowns or population behavior changes it would certainly happen everywhere. It did NOT happen with any flu epidemic since 1918, which is one way we know COVID19 is worse than those epidemics.

You can say the same thing for every plague, war and catastrophe in history. It doesn't prove anything.

Most people here in NZ don't expect to remain free of COVID19 forever, but we do expect there to be some kind of vaccine. Even an imperfect vaccine will be a huge help in managing the disease when it arrives for good.

Lockdown isn't the right word. We haven't had a lockdown here for months.

The tourism situation isn't as bad as it might sound. Before the pandemic domestic tourism was already >50% of local tourism spend. Domestic tourism spending is increasing sharply because NZers don't want to travel overseas. A big part of the problem for tourism operators is simply that domestic spending is more bursty because of school holidays.

Yes, if there's no vaccine NZ will have some hard decisions to make. But it is much more likely that there will be a vaccine. Even a vaccine that's not very effective would still give us valuable options. E.g. if it only works for 80% of people, or only lasts for an average of three months, vaccinating everyone and then dropping border controls would still be much better than the kind of spread other countries have had to date; spread would be slower and cases less severe.

And yes, I know about their 2017 Russia release. That was weak sauce, clearly a controlled release. https://www.wired.com/story/wi...

That's the problem with Wikileaks --- it was always fighting against the Western establishment, and never against China, Russia and other non-Western bad actors. Which makes it all too likely that Assange is a Russian stooge, perhaps consciously, perhaps not.

Even in the 1920s people knew that it was wrong to chase women around a desk because you want to have sex with them.

You don't know me at all so no need to bother with the wild accusations.

I don't have a problem with the gender swaps. They'll need to change a lot more than just gender to make the characters more interesting than the plastic characters Asimov wrote.

There's a looming problem for this series, which is that Asimov was a sexually-harrassing creep who would totally be canceled today, and deserve it. Maybe the gender swaps will help them dodge that.

Orphan Black is awesome. I guess technically it's an "almost all female cast", but more accurately it's an "almost all Tatiana Maslany cast" :-).

No, in NZ the publicly declared goal shifted quickly to "eliminate the virus" so we can quickly get back to normal life. That has been achieved (for now). Yes, we are prepared if we get new cases.