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Actuary analysis shows that New Zealand& #39;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& #39;s been a drop of a bit over a tenth of a percentage point).
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Young people aren& #39;t affected at all, the middle-aged slightly, but the higher the age group, the more the effect.
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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& #39;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& #39;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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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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So closing your borders & requiring long quarantines for those allowed in does prevent viruses from getting into your country. (Not a surprise, we& #39;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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But that also means you& #39;re building up an unprecedented stock of & #39;dry tinder& #39; (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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And if you don& #39;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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So you& #39;ll have the same mortality over, say, a five-year period. But in the meantime you& #39;ll have smashed your country& #39;s GDP, imprisoned your population, and given the state a massive expansion of powers.
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That doesn& #39;t sound like a good deal to me.
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