New Zealand Isn’t Just Flattening the COVID-19 Curve. It’s Squashing It.

That’s the headline from an article in today’s Washington Post. It appears that, since New Zealand’s coronavirus lockdown on all nonessential activities, it took only 10 days for signs that the approach here is working. They’re targeting “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries, and it’s having stunning results.

“The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections.”

Well, that’s all fine and well, but this isn’t really a good comparison, insofar as New Zealand lacks many of the key ingredients that propel the exponential growth rates that we’re experiencing here in the United States. In particular, they lack:

• A population of self-centered young people partying in Florida, who couldn’t care less that they are carrying the disease as they went back to their home towns to spread the disease around the nation

• Governors who are so ignorant that they don’t understand that asymptomatic people can transmit the virus

• A huge percentage of under- and uneducated people

• Leadership by a pathological liar and criminal sociopath

• An entire political party devoted to greed, hate, and ignorance, while supporting that sociopath

• Religious fanatics who don’t believe in science

• A television network that reaches about 15% of its adult population, dedicated to disseminating false information about the nature of the disease, its severity, its possible cures, and scientists’ recommendations for its containment

• A society built around greed and total indifference to the well-being of others

I venture to say that if New Zealand were defined by the same sad characteristics as the U.S., they too would find themselves crushed by the pandemic just as we are here.