There’s a real propensity of our western commonwealth allies to stick the boot into Aotearoa when we move in our own direction. This year the other four Five Eyes countries US, UK, Australia, and Canada had some choice words (and I imagine diplomatic pressure) for us over our relationship with China. This ignores the fact that as a small trading nation we have economic strategies that rely on them. Not to mention that we have an independent foreign policy as a sovereign state, distinct from our military allies.

More recently this propensity has taken a more malicious form (though to be fair only from the US, UK and AUS) - and expanded much more broadly to include not only the countries’ political figures but a swathe of their media and commentariat. Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, said this week:

"We don't shut the country down because of the flu, we don't do that. We don't do it for other infectious diseases... You can manage this with some baseline element, common-sense measures so you can treat it like the flu and that's where we want to get - that's what living with COVID-19 is."

Morrison also likened our response to “living in a cave”. This, conveniently after Australia’s own response has fallen over thanks in large part to the insufficient actions of NSW State Premier Gladys Berejiklian- who was peddling similar lines.

We’ve also seen constant attacks from media in the US, UK and Australia, often spreading outright disinformation about Aotearoa being a prison camp, or using other such language to describe the (imaginary) authoritarianism that has taken over our country. These seem to have the intent of undermining and belittling our response, in an attempt to convince their own citizens that no other response could have been possible. Importantly, though a huge majority of Aotearoa’s citizens support the way we’ve responded to it.

Let’s look at the responses of the US, UK and Australia. Because while we hear a lot about how we’re failing - even from within our own stable of pundits - we often don’t get news about how our allies are faring. Keep in mind that many of these numbers (all accessed on 25 August 2021) are in an environment where extensive vaccinations have already been carried out.

Up until recently Australia had been following an elimination strategy - and it’s served them incredibly well. They’ve only had 45,000 cases, that’s nearly 2000 per million people, but in NSW alone they now have almost 1000 new cases a day. They’ve only had 984 deaths.

In the UK they’ve had 6.5million cases, that’s nearly 100,000 per million people, and 23,000 new cases a day. 131,854 people have died. And they’re still losing well over 100 people to the virus every day.

In the US they’ve had over 38million cases, that’s nearly 120,000 per million people, and 150,000 new cases a day. 631,050 people have died. And they’re still losing well over 1000 people to the virus every day.

In Aotearoa we’ve had 3,159 cases, that’s just over 600 per million people. While we lockdown to try and stamp out this current outbreak our cases per day have been rising (which should be expected due to the infectiousness of the Delta variant)- to 63 at last count. Most importantly, only 26 people have died from COVID since the pandemic began.

These numbers don’t even take into account the effects of “Long Covid”, which by any measure are going to lead to lifetimes of disability for many survivors. Neither has it taken into account the economic effects, or the destitution it has left people in while they’ve been unable to work. Nor the amount of time each country has spent under severe restrictions to their ‘freedoms’. Nor the strain on health systems and health workers as this pandemic continues despite vaccination rates. I think we can see that we’ve used the right strategy, as non-exhaustive as these numbers are.

You may think it nasty for me to bring up these statistics in this context- to compare and contrast Aotearoa’s results with others’.

But it’s nastier for our allies - who should be applauding our success - to try and force a eugenicist and fatal COVID response strategy on us. They should be ashamed.

Kyle Church is the Co-founder, Producer and Editor for 1/200

Covid Comparisons - NZ and the Commonwealth