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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
The bolded is not really how it worked in New Zealand. They still imported goods.
Aside from that, my point was not that everyone could have done it exactly the way New Zealand did and failed for not doing so. I'm not even sure why we need to recycle this conversation. COVID-zero was the ideal approach, and lockdowns were beneficial and successful from both an economic and health perspective, compared to similar countries/areas that did not lockdown.
There were no economic factors ignored. These are facts. And my position is not one I pulled from thin air, it's taken from reading the positions of economists who seem to collectively agree that lockdowns (and in many areas, much more aggressive ones) were the best route to limiting the economic impact of the pandemic. Are they all ignoring economic factors? I don't know. I hope not?
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The virus doesn't survive very well on objects. New Zealand's only regular contact (non-personal) with other nations is unloading shipping containers. That's not so for Canada. We have all sorts of actual people traveling across the border for non-personal reasons every day.
Another factor to consider is that Canada already had far more cases of Covid than than New Zealand did by the time any sort of lockdowns came into effect.
There wasn't a single nation in Canada's climate zone that managed to get things down to zero. The closest was probably......Iceland, also an island state.
When you're pushing for zero, when it simply isn't possible, you're putting unnecessary restrictions into place and causing economic damage that doesn't need to happen. It's easy to think of the "economy" as some abstract place where greedy people make money. But the reality is that it's actually small businesses, family debt, life savings, etc.. that your affecting.