How New Zealand Crushed the Curve
A vaccine will be necessary to help the country’s economy
In late April, New Zealand’s public health officials announced that the spread of Covid-19 had ceased within its borders. The world cheered, and headlines trumpeted the strength and compassion of the country’s political leadership and its science-first policies as an important cause of its success.
These factors certainly helped New Zealand crush its epidemic curve, says John Crump, MD, a global health epidemiologist at the University of Otago in Auckland, but they don’t exist in a vacuum: New Zealand also has innate characteristics that both enabled and incentivized the approach its leaders took to eliminating Covid-19, he says — and it’s impossible to fully understand the success of its approach without acknowledging them.
Geography helps. So does fast action.
Because New Zealand is a geographically isolated and sparsely populated island country, infectious diseases that plague other parts of the world are often delayed in breaching its borders and spreading widely once they do. Working against the country, meanwhile, is its relatively low capacity to care for a massive wave of severely ill people: a 2018 analysis suggested that the nation had one-quarter of the per-capita number of…
