If there is any hyping being done it’s not over New Zealand, but over Sweden.
Sweden has roughly twice as many people as New Zealand but saw around four times as many deaths from Covid.
One aggressively locked down. The other didn’t.
What is conveniently forgotten by the anti lockdown, let it do it’s worst, hypocrites is that every country was facing a new disease, with no known cure, but with symptoms requiring hospitalisation for many and a significant mortality rate. Or so it seemed at the time.
Only as the ways to limit its spread became better understood and practiced and experience was gained could more accurate judgments be made. Until then extreme caution was needed, and taken.
Every country had to decide, given their demographics and the behaviour characteristics of the people, what was going to be the best management strategy. To apply one country’s strategy elsewhere attempts to ignore that. Sweden thought social distancing would be enough for them. Others, New Zealand included didn’t. Which proved the wisest decision depends on how you value life against the cost of preserving it.
The game changer were the vaccines, which alongside the greater understanding, allowed us to slowly push Covid into the same category as the flu.
Of course those opposing lockdowns also seemed to be the group who decided to oppose the vaccines.
Why is this? I think it’s much more to do with a general antipathy to authority than to anything else. They don’t like being told what to do.
The demographic and behavioural characteristics of a population are always going to shape how effective any strategy is. The trouble is that the strategy only works if people actually follow it.
I still remember driving through Leicester during the local lockdown. Groups in the area had put out statements saying COVID was disproportionately affecting the local Asian community and that the restrictions were unfair because they punished larger families who needed to support each other. Fair enough in theory. Then you drove through in June 2020 and there was basically no social distancing happening anywhere. That’s the issue in a nutshell. You can design the perfect rules, but none of it matters if people don’t comply.
New Zealand gets held up as the ideal case, but it’s an island with a completely different demographic and geography. The UK is a patchwork of communities with wildly different living situations, population densities, and cultural habits. Predictably, some areas were hit much harder than others.
I lost a parent to COVID. They were isolating, went out a couple of times, caught it, and that was that. At the same time, I was running a business and watching the financial side collapse around me and my clients. So I’ve had both sides of this fall on my head. Hindsight is flawless, but only once the dust has settled and all the data is neatly arranged in a report no one wants to read.
Lockdowns only work if people follow them. If not, you either police it or accept it won’t hold. And the demographic mix determines how realistic either option is. Whoever was in power was stuck with a thankless, lose-lose job.
The debate has now become two immovable camps. One side says everything should have shut down to save lives. The other insists freedom should trump everything and the weak would have to get through it. Neither group will concede anything.
Did lockdowns save lives? Yes. Did they cause long-term damage? Also yes. I’ve got someone working for me whose child missed nursery because of restrictions and now struggles with social interaction and anger. On the other hand, my parent died. How is anyone supposed to weigh that? You can’t make those choices cleanly when you’re living through it, not reading about it twenty years later with perfect clarity.
Every group, whether cultural, age-related, disability-related, anti-immigration, pro-freedom, whatever, believes their rights should come first. Someone in government had to make a decision anyway. Were all of those decisions right? No. Were they made with the intention of doing harm? Also no.
We shouldn’t compare the UK to anywhere else. The conditions aren’t the same, the people aren’t the same, and pretending they are just creates more shouting. What we can do is learn from it. But the core remains the same: rules, regulations, guidelines, lockdowns, whatever you call them, only work if people are actually prepared to follow them.
Using that same logic with other arguments: you’ve often claimed Britain should have held another referendum to rejoin the EU because the outcome affects younger people more than older voters like yourself. But follow that reasoning through. By that standard, we shouldn’t have had lockdowns either, because younger people were far more likely to survive COVID than elderly pensioners such as you. Yet nobody seriously argued that pensioners should be written off for the sake of the under-30s.
Once you start ranking one group’s interests above another’s, the whole thing collapses. People dig in, become entrenched, and stay utterly convinced they’re right, no matter how messy the reality actually is.
Take World War II as an example. People were conscripted, sent to fight, and many never came home. It was devastating for the families involved, but the wider reality was that the country had to survive what was happening across Europe. A government made one decision in the present that carried horrible immediate consequences, yet was judged necessary for long-term survival.
And likewise, a single decision can delay pain today and cause far greater damage tomorrow. That’s the uncomfortable truth behind all of this: you never know the full impact of a decision until long after it’s been made. Judging those choices with hindsight ignores what it was actually like to make them in real time, under pressure, with incomplete information.
And that leads to the final point. The people in power had to make decisions, just as you say they should. Hindsight is always 20-20. Anyone in government at that point, regardless of party, would have got some things right and some things wrong. There’s no scenario where any leader navigates that perfectly. Throwing blame around now doesn’t bring anyone back and doesn’t fix the damage done. I certainly don’t hold them personally responsible for what happened to my family. COVID was bigger than any one politician, and decisions were made with the information available at the time but lockdowns undoubtedly have caused some issues, that everyone is going to be paying for for years
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