OECD – Public Health Expert, University of Otago, New Zealand

Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Leah Grout, Dr Jennifer Summers, Dr Nhung Nghiem, Prof Michael Baker (author details*)

Aotearoa/NZ has achieved the lowest death rate in the OECD from the COVID-19 pandemic, equivalent to around 2000 lives saved compared to the OECD average. With regard to economic harm, NZ appears to be close to the OECD average, with the IMF predictions for GDP in 2020 overall being -6.1% for NZ and -6.3% for the OECD. Nevertheless, a fuller accounting of health, economic and equity impacts probably needs to wait until vaccination is sufficiently available and border restrictions are lifted. Despite NZ’s health success there is still a need to improve border controls (eg, with a “traffic light” system), until the population is protected by vaccination.

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Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Tim Chambers, Dr Amanda Kvalsvig, Dr Anja Mizdrak, Dr Nhung Nghiem, Dr Jennifer Summers, Prof Michael Baker

NZ has now achieved the lowest death rate from the COVID-19 pandemic out of 37 OECD countries and appears to be the only one to succeed with elimination at a national level. But despite the success of the “team of 5 million” – there are still a number of gaps in our defences. In particular, there is a need to upgrade: (i) border controls; (ii) the Alert Level system; (iii) the use of digital technologies to support contact tracing; (iv) testing & surveillance for early outbreak detection; (v) the kinds of policies, institutions and laws needed to sustain our world-class response.

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· Peer review process: Where a blog post has a single author, then the content is always peer-reviewed by at least one senior academic in public health. This is to help ensure that statements have a reasonable basis in terms of scientific plausibility and to ensure that uncertainty is appropriately acknowledged where statements have speculative aspects. For multi-authored blogs there can also be additional peer-review. Of note is that the PHE blog posts are often well-referenced so that readers can readily check the background science and arguments.

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Health and Economic Impacts of the COVID-19 Response: NZ Compared to OECD Countries

NZ’s “Team of 5 million” has achieved the lowest COVID-19 death rate in the OECD – but there are still gaps in our pandemic response

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