As a testament to how quickly the tide can turn in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation of New Zealand has had to peel back its declared victory over the illness due to a recent spike in domestic cases.
In June of this year, New Zealand national health officials said that aggressive and early action against the pandemic, along with unique geography as an island nation, led them to declare NZL as corona-free. As a result of the last known infect person having recovered that month, the nation eased all restrictions with life returning to relatively normal.
This meant that sport could get back to swing, with Swimming New Zealand announcing its first meet back as the Secondary School Championships, which were scheduled for August 20th-23rd. However, today, August 14th, Swimming New Zealand has announced the cancellation of the event in light of recent coronavirus data.
The nation had entered August relatively quietly, with just a one-off positive test here and there with several days’ worth of zero new positive coronavirus cases. However, August 11th saw 4 new cases reported in just that day, followed by a spike on August 13th of 14 new cases of the virus.
With this in mind, Swimming New Zealand revealed the following regarding the aforementioned Secondary School Championships:
With the Governments Covid-19 announcement that has just been made, and the continuation of Alert Level 3 in Auckland and Alert Level 2 for the rest of the country, we have no choice but to postpone next weeks NZ Secondary School Championships. I know this will be a further blow to those swimmers who had been preparing for NAGs, had that cancelled, and have for the past couple of months been preparing to get back into racing via the Secondary School Champs but the postponement of this event is unavoidable under the current Alert Level status.
We are currently looking at whether we will be able to reschedule the event to another date later in the year and will update you all on this next Friday 21st with either a rescheduled date for the event or confirmation that the event has been cancelled for the year. Â
These remain challenging times for us all so please keep safe and take care.Â
A reminder that the virus doesn’t just go away and you also can’t expect people to be on permanent lock down. After all these months I believe we understand there’s some compromise involved. Masks and distancing can go a long way as well as safety protocols to allow businesses to remain open.
“It is what it is.”
It is not easy to get infected with this virus if we follow simple guidelines and behave reasonably. Unfortunately, half of people are arrogant, ignorant, and plain stupid.
The big deal now is to figure out how it “re-appeared”in New Zealand and Vietnam. Was one of last sick people declared virus free when s/he was not actually, and s/he then infected some people who were asymptomatic and they infected more people (likely)? Or did it jump from pets to people (less likely). Or an infected Aussie swam to New Zealand (unlikely, since Aussies are primarily known as sprinters :))
It was Grant Hackett
Agree and we’ve tried something similar in the US. That island had some strict guidelines and yet the cases are surging as of late.
You basically just described the previously unseen problem with democracy. The ceiling is set by the fixed beliefs of the arrogant, ignorant, and plain stupid.
What did expect? For 30 years, education has been replaced by reality shows while trickle down economics made people poorer and more dependant on fairy American Dream stories. I do not want to go on another rant here – I just hope, for the sake of young people, this country makes significant system changes so another Trump does not happen. Our system of checks and balances is broken and must be fixed – I will not hold my breath that will happen with Biden though. Establishment Democrats are evil as well.
I disagree with the “eh”. There were the travel restrictions early on that were heavily criticized, largest stimulus package ever, encouragement of respirator production, distancing/shutdown/opening guidelines as well. You also have to consider Fauci and Berks have changed their positions over time for example on wearing a mask.
It’s easy to sit back after 8 months and say what they should and shouldn’t have done, but it’s a fine balance to try and maintain on an unprecedented situation that the science community is having a hard time with. It’s also amplified in this being an election year so its become a political hammer as well.
Most sensible statement made on this site in months-should be the main article. Kudos to Mr Monroe.
You think that a statement about American politics and response should be the main article on a story about New Zealand?
This is what I hate about political discourse today. “Most sensible statement made on this site in months” now just means “The statement that most closely fits my political ideology.” Have the self awareness to recognize that the two are not one in the same, at least.
“Discourse” implies debate. There’s no debating with the Q crowd.
NZ is happy that the Isreali ‘ tourists’ will not be trying to break into their 5 Eyes Security network looking for US Covid 19 wisdoms.. Because there are none .
You can give some credit for all that but it was flushed down the toilet when the leader described it as a hoax, the flu is worse, just going to disappear, we’ll be open by Easter, we’re leading the world, if we didn’t test we wouldn’t have cases, and all the other contradictory or nonsensical messaging, and — on top of it — doesn’t wear a mask himself and crams the Hermann Cains of the world into a maskless rally shoulder to shoulder. Can’t applaud one without acknowledging the other.
Trump and Q appear to be living rent free in your mind Ol Longhorn.
There’s no debating with hardcore left wingers either. They simply think they’re smarter and more informed than everyone else. See where that got us? Nowhere.
By the way, Sweden has recorded one COVID death in all of August. Maybe they’re on to something?
I’m not sure where you got the one COVID death in August, but every source I’ve found shows between 25 and 50 deaths in Sweden in the month of August.
Braden, check date of death, not day it’s reported
7 people died in Sweden from coronavirus just yesterday. Not many compared to 320 in Texas (3 times size of Sweden) but still not 1 in August.
I haven’t found a source that reports “date of death” explicitly, but if the implication is that there’s a 2 week lag in reporting, so all of the deaths reported so far in August actually happened in July, then I’m not really sure why it’s interesting to say that there has “only been 1 recorded death in August so far.”
Seems like if what you say is true, then we won’t know how many deaths there actually were in August until mid-September.
Uhhhh aren’t you the one who likes to say “New York screwed up because they have so many more deaths than anyone else, even though they all came early in the pandemic, so New York is all-time worse than Florida and Texas, even though New York only has about 10 new deaths per day this month and Florida has 200 death/day and Texas has 200 deaths/day”?
How is that any different than Sweden, which already has one of the worst overall death tolls in the world per capita based on their early response?
New York and New Jersey’s death rate (heck thrown in CT and MASS as well) is triple that of Sweden. They all reached the same herd immunity result.
Sweden suffered far less economic damage.
And in all these places (minus NY) the after age age of death was around 80. This is when people normally die unfortunately.
You keep bringing up “success” of Sweden and I will keep posted these stats (as of today):
Sweden
84,294 Cases
5,783 Deaths
Czech Republic
19,891 cases
395 deaths
Same population, same 5-6% economic downturn. Who did better? Your herd seeking Sweden or more restrictive Czech Republic? Unless you think those extra 5,400 Swedish were all 80+ and did not deserve to live anymore? Same comparison holds with Sweden’s neighbours.
Psycho, the idea that the government can control our date of death is absurd. Maybe some of it came down to bad luck
Also, Czech Republic Could easily have another spike.
Whether you agree or not, Sweden’s strategy was way better than USA.
Give the people credit that they are smart, don’t treat them like children.
And yes, people in their 80s die. My guess is that at the end of the year, Sweden will have the same number of all cause deaths as they did last year. And you would still pull out their exact number of coronavirus deaths to “prove” they failed.
More Florida condos available?
People keep talking about Sweden, but that makes absolutely no sense. Swedish people are healthy people. American people are NOT. Just go to an average supermarket in the US and Sweden and they are 2 completely different worlds. Most americans are overweight and unhealthy and those are pre existing conditions
So punish the whole US population for some people’s poor life choices. That’s awesome
Hospitals can’t operate the normal way. For example I have 2 family members who got their urgent surgeries postponed because of covid. We fix the problem or we live with a messed up healthcare system. Acting like the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t fix anything.
Herman was 24 Hours From Tulsa anyhow .
The same imperial college model that said 2.2 million Americans would die Steve?
The fundamental issue worldwide is that almost every nation is treating COVID-19, which has a 99.8% recovery rate, like it’s Ebola, HIV/AIDS or another very deadly disease. They are using the same playbook for a vastly different situation. Speaks to a broken public health system.
No, a virus will act like a virus and our mitigation efforts have done little to nothing. New Zealand has only put off the spread of the virus. During all of H1N1 the US conducted 77,000 tests. Now we test 700,000+ a day with the the New York Times saying we should be testing “millions”. H1N1 was estimated to infect 60 million Americans and we did none of these mitigation efforts.
Same CDC and same NIH, but different administrations.
The fact that you refuse to be skeptical about anything other than Trump is very telling.
Our response is out of line and doing unnecessary harm. For instance, the CDC recently found that 25% of those aged 16-24 are… Read more »
NZ is everything US left does not like. It is actually a mono very British society.. Whilst The US l st i ts citizens return home , the NZ Health Dept advised the Govt NOT to let it’s citizens re enter NZ ! It is nowhere as liberal as Americans want to think. They are decisive because they are a unicameral govt with NO Senate & No constitution just conventions which the Parliament can redirect. There are no states .
Comparing a nation of 350 million to one with less than 5 million is crazy. I’d rather compare New Zealand to Sweden (though New Zealand has the advantage of being an island). Sweden still wins in my book. They’re all cause deaths for the year will be very similar to last year as 75%+ of their deaths are nursing home deaths.
Sweden 5,700 dead, New Zealand 22 – quite a win, huh?
Perspective from a Swedish doc:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/08/04/how-bad-is-covid-really-a-swedish-doctors-perspective/#comments
How I came up with 3,000, you’ll have to do some maths to figure it out as it’s not the best display.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries
In the US and UK, many of the excess deaths are attributed To “lockdown deaths”. There are a wide array of articles detailing lockdown deaths (maybe not in such reputable sources as the Atlantic). History won’t be kind to these insane interventions we did during Covid.
Perspective on a Swedish doc:
https://pagosadailypost.com/2020/08/14/editorial-covid-and-the-power-of-anecdotal-stories-part-one/
Highlights:
Finished medical school in January.
Unclear what his actual qualifications are.
He openly acknowledges that his experience is purely anecdotal, and not based on actual data. I’d love to see a meta-study of the anecdotal opinions of emergency room physicians around the world and see what percentage agree with Rushworth, and which don’t.
lockdowns work and covid 19 deaths are the only true measure of whether a society is effective or not. we shouldn’t have a full return to normal until at least a year straight of no new covid cases.
Only certain “experts” should have a say in the way we live our day to day lives. They are far smarter and wiser than us.
you win.
What I’d give to worry about a spike being 14 cases country-wide in a day. Hell, I’d be happy with just 14 cases in a day in one school district.
No kidding. It’s going to be an explosion of positive tests once schools reopen throughout the country. The Georgia results are already far beyond even the worst projections from a month ago. Tokyo 2021 may be 12 months away but in practicality it’s 8-9 months before a decision has to be made. If the United States numbers spike throughout fall due to schools reopening then not only do deaths continue to mount but we’re giving away nearly half of that 8-9 months. Then if Biden wins I’d say he is more likely to be hesitant about sending athletes during an ongoing pandemic. So basically the right wingers are allowing Trump to create something that they might condemn Biden for later.… Read more »
Yeah, Tokyo is toast. Unfortunately.
I wouldn’t put it that callously but I worry it will be displaced/cancelled
You sound like Susan Collins.
I’ve just come from viewing vid from Portland Oregon & Portland Maine. It is up to the US what they want .
NFL
Dooger, enough with your radical left winger spin. You can make an even stronger case that the death numbers are overstated as are the infections. Everything is covid related these days so they can get the gov’t subsidy. For example Britain just revised the way they count the deaths…. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-deaths-idUSKCN2582DV
At least they act quickly when an outbreak occurs
You know, we don’t feel any better about California dragging us down but have some sympathy here.
California has 39.5M people, of course they would have more cases, they have 10M more people than the next closest state.
Relax dude, California is bad at almost everything so not many will take offense to my sarcasm.
No. That is wrong. A better stat would be cases or death per capita. Im not from CA but am not clueless either. CA is the engine for global tech, creating lots of jobs and wealth. Would be the 5th largest GDP in the world if a country. The stock market for the last few years has been driven up by tech companies but troll on.