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Neither here nor there though, considering they closed their borders quickly.
I think it's pretty relevant - my point was that the economic and social cost to NZ of closing their borders is much lower than the cost to a country like the UK that isn't self sufficient in most basic goods. If you'd tried to pull up the drawbridge with strict hotel quarantine for 18 months we'd probably have starved.
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New Zealand has a very well travelled population. IIRC one of the countries with the highest rates of passport ownership. It used to be the case that approx 10% of the population. We’re out of the country at any one time, and half of them were in London, making London the second largest kiwi city.
But much less international travel, you would think? NZ's great advantage was that policymakers could treat the country as a closed system, whereas in the UK the effects of closing the borders are massively greater given family and business ties to Europe.
The scale of the UK's contact tracing problem in the early weeks became unsolvably massive almost immediately. Silly example but remember the issue about Excel running out of rows (1.5 million or something)?