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- Published on: 2 March 2022
- Published on: 2 March 2022In New Zealand Zero-Covid resulted in the best outcome
The argument Jecker and Au mount against an elimination strategy for Covid-19 fails to account for the New Zealand experience. They discuss the question of excess mortality and suggest that tactics to reduce Covid-19 related deaths inadvertently increase deaths from other causes. Whilst this is intuitively true actual country wide data undermines their argument: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/pubhealthexpert/mortality-declines-in-aotearoa... New Zealand experienced negative excess deaths for the years 2020-21 as did Australia and Taiwan. Had New Zealand experienced the same rate of excess deaths as the USA we could have expected 19,900 deaths which would have disproportionately affected ethnic minorities and the vulnerable. The elimination strategy in New Zealand was by far the best strategy to address health disparities, without it many more of those suffering disparities would have died.
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None declared.
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