Re: You don't have herd immunity for MERS or Ebola
Please don't use NZ as an example. Our contact tracing was a shambles. People who KNEW they had been in contact with one of our biggest clusters went to the press to complain that 48 hours after the cluster was identified and 48 hours after the DG of Health publicly said that comprehensive contact tracing was being URGENTLY undertaken, they still had not been contacted.
Likewise our testing rate was diabolical during the majority of the outbreak here. It was only once numbers had started to decline that testing ramped up to effective numbers.
Testing and tracing was only effective at all because of the low number of cases, not the other way around.
In fact, just about everything the government SAID they were doing was subsequently shown to be far removed from what was actually happening. Even the PM widely applauded 20% pay cut (leaving her only earning 20% more than Boris Johnson, PM of a country with 15x the population and commensurately larger economy and higher GDP, rather than the usual 50% more that she usually pockets)... that announcement was then followed by the government VETOing a change to the legislation required to make that pay cut possible, two weeks after making the promise to take the pay cut and having done nothing in those two weeks themselves.
Our low numbers had far more to do with the geographic remoteness, sparse population and lack of high density population centres than any steps taken by the government.
Indeed, the government had to be FORCED into every step they took, belatedly.
The medical community had to petition the government to close schools with the government defending to the last minute keeping them open. One of our top 2 largest outbreak clusters was then a school.
The opposition party had to petition the government to impose mandatory quarantine at the borders because of widely publicised breaches of the "honor system" of asking people pretty please to self isolate upon arrival and the acknowledgement by the Commissioner of Police that there was NO comprehensive follow up to ensure that self-isolation was being observed and in the few cases that had been spot-checked there were a large number of instances of the property given as the self isolation address being found to be completely empty.
Our Health Minister breached the lockdown rules and was allowed to keep his job. You might think this was because he was crucial to the governments response, except that he never fronted any questions to the media and has no relevant medical or health profession experience or expertise. What he does have is a Prime Minister who - as revealed by an Official Information Act request - did not trust her own ministers to even answer questions from the media, issuing written instructions to ministers to "dismiss" questions and requiring that any statements or responses they did make be submitted for her personal approval in advance.
The NZ government has done a masterful job of presenting itself as competent and effective through this. The reality however is completely different, despite the numbers.
The outcome speaks for itself. That is, the outcome tells us only what the outcome was. It does not tell the story of the control freak running the country with an indecisive and incompetent government.