Hard, Not Early: Putting the New Zealand Covid-19 Response in Context

John Gibson

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: A popular narrative that New Zealand’s policy response to Coronavirus was ‘go hard, go early’ is misleading. While restrictions were the most stringent in the world during the Level 4 lockdown in March and April, these were imposed after the likely peak in new infections. I use the time path of Covid-19 deaths for each OECD country to estimate inflection points. Allowing for the typical lag from infection to death, new infections peaked before the most stringent policy responses were applied in many countries, including New Zealand. The cross-country evidence shows that restrictions imposed after the inflection point in infections is reached are ineffective in reducing total deaths. Even restrictions imposed earlier have just a modest effect; if Sweden’s more relaxed restrictions had been used, an extra 310 Covid-19 deaths are predicted for New Zealand – far fewer than the thousands of deaths predicted for New Zealand by some mathematical models.

Keywords: coronavirus; Covid-19; deaths; policy timing; response stringency; New Zealand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2020-09-09
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https://repec.its.waikato.ac.nz/wai/econwp/2008.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Hard, not early: putting the New Zealand Covid-19 response in context (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wai:econwp:20/08

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