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Actuary analysis shows that New Zealand's all-cause death figures have dropped in 2020, by around a tenth. (If we look at the proportion of the population who die each year there's been a drop of a bit over a tenth of a percentage point).
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Young people aren't affected at all, the middle-aged slightly, but the higher the age group, the more the effect.
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2/11
This is likely due to closing the borders rather than lockdown, because (a) NZ relied on border closures more than lockdowns, and (b) countries with lockdowns didn't see this happen (lockdowns kill).
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We already know that a lot of elderly deaths are caused by viruses which aren't very dangerous to most people finishing off some people already near death.
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Generally such people are either too frail to cope with a virus (frailty is the biggest predictor of Covid death, for eg), and/or they have an immunosenescence.
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5/11
This data tells us that probably some of these viruses (influenza, for eg) come from international travellers bringing it back with them into the country.
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6/11
So closing your borders & requiring long quarantines for those allowed in does prevent viruses from getting into your country. (Not a surprise, we've always known that international travel spreads disease.) So it may give a few elderly people near death a bit longer to live.
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7/11
But that also means you're building up an unprecedented stock of 'dry tinder' (for want of a better term) who will, soon after you open the borders, get sick when a a load of new viruses floods in, overwhelm the hospitals, and die off quickly.
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8/11
And if you don't open the borders most of these people will still die before too long anyway, as they are near end-of-life now.
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9/11
So you'll have the same mortality over, say, a five-year period. But in the meantime you'll have smashed your country's GDP, imprisoned your population, and given the state a massive expansion of powers.
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10/11
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
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