Use of the Elimination Strategy in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Health and Economic Impacts for New Zealand Relative to Other OECD Countries

  1. Nick Wilson
  2. Leah Grout
  3. Jennifer A Summers
  4. Nhung Nghiem
  5. Michael G Baker

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Abstract

Background

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some countries in the Asia-Pacific Region used very intensive control measures, and one of these, New Zealand (NZ), adopted a clear “elimination strategy”. We therefore aimed to compare key health and economic outcomes of NZ relative to OECD countries as of mid-June 2021.

Methods

This analysis compared health outcomes (cumulative death rates from COVID-19 and “excess death” rates) and economic measures (quarterly GDP and unemployment levels) across OECD countries.

Results

NZ had the lowest cumulative COVID-19 death rate in the OECD at 242 times lower than the 38-OECD-country average: 5·2 vs 1256 per million population. When considering “excess deaths”, NZ had the largest negative value in the OECD, equivalent to around 2000 fewer deaths than expected. When considering the average GDP change over the five quarters of 2020 to 2021-Q1, NZ was the sixth best performer (at 0·5% vs -0·3% for the OECD average). The increase in unemployment in NZ was also less than the OECD average (1·1 percentage points to a peak of 5·2%, vs 3·3 points to 8·6%, respectively).

Conclusions

New Zealand’s elimination strategy response to COVID-19 produced the best mortality protection outcomes in the OECD. In economic terms it also performed better than the OECD average in terms of adverse impacts on GDP and employment. Nevertheless, a fuller accounting of the benefits and costs needs to be done once the population is vaccinated and longer-term health and economic outcomes are considered.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.25.21259556: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Study strengths and limitations: This analysis benefited from the case study country (New Zealand) having a very clearly articulated elimination strategy, whereas the strategic approach is generally poorly defined for other OECD countries (ie, varying intensities of suppression and mitigation5 and sometimes shifting from mitigation to suppression as per the UK). The analysis was also able to supplement COVID-19 death rate data with “excess deaths” data to obtain a richer understanding of the likely health impacts. Focusing on OECD countries also allows for relatively standardised comparisons of economic data. Nevertheless, this analysis is both preliminary and fairly high-level. The pandemic is far from over globally and New Zealand could yet experience border system failures that result in major health and economic consequences (eg, before a high proportion of the population is vaccinated). In particular, the further economic recovery for other OECD countries with higher vaccination levels than New Zealand, could change the longer-term economic analysis. That is, the ultimate economic assessment of the pandemic responses should probably consider a multi-year period. More specific limitations that will have underestimated the health and economic benefits of New Zealand’s elimination strategy to date, include: But on the other-hand, our analysis did not quantify additional downsides of New Zealand’s COVID-19 response: We also used high-level economic metrics such as GDP which ...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.06.25.21259556v1 on medRxiv