New Zealand had the third consecutive day of 0 new coronavirus cases, and is now down to just 65 active cases. Today, we entered Alert Level 2, which is mostly normal life just with some social distancing requirements (most mass gatherings are limited to no more than 10 people), the economy is now running at nearly full capacity. I think we now have a reasonably good testing and tracing capacity in place. The 'Recovery Budget' is coming in a few minutes.
For other countries, this shows that intervening earlier would likely have been much better not only for health outcomes but economically and socially today. The UK for instance would not only have saved tens of thousands of lives but probably been able to return to normal life sooner and with less economic damage had they acted more decisively. New Zealand wasn't naturally invulnerable to this pandemic. We were probably less prepared than most of Europe with only around 200 ICU beds in the entire country in late March-just 4.7 per 100,000 people (just over a third of Italy's capacity), and we have higher obesity rates than the UK. However elimination is not a realistic strategy anymore in most of Europe and the US sadly, so those countries have a much more difficult set of challenges and choices.
21 deaths and 9 days since the last one, too. NZ really deserve a round of applause for this one.