[ceejayoz]

New Zealand has 13 deaths per million residents. The US has nearly 3,000 deaths per million.

Vaccination decouples case numbers from severe disease and death. The calculus on avoiding cases changes significantly once you get the population well vaccinated.

[LittleMoveBig]

New Zealand is just at the beginning of its first major wave and deaths lag considerably, so it's a bit early to be drawing this comparison. I would agree they're likely to experience a lower death count than the U.S. but not by this magnitude.

Also, presumably the epidemiological factors which are causing Americans to die from COVID at higher rates are also likely to apply to Americans who are infected while traveling to New Zealand.

[ceejayoz]

> New Zealand is just at the beginning of its first major wave...

Yes, and they're entering it with a well-vaccinated population, especially in the vulnerable age groups. Even with variants in play, evidence points heavily to that meaning cases won't lead to significant numbers of severe disease and death.

[timr]

That's fine, but it has nothing to do with travel warnings. The US state department didn't tell unvaccinated people to avoid travel to NZ, it made a blanket recommendation.

You started this subthread by making a comment about "burning rooms", implying that the US situation is somehow worse than New Zealand in the present moment. Historical trends are what they are, but currently, irrespective of aggregate historical death rate, NZ is doing worse than the US. There's probably a greater risk of catching Covid right now in NZ than there is in the US.

(But this is all a silly discussion. The horse is out of the barn, Covid is literally everywhere, and these travel restrictions do nothing but cause pain. About the best you can say is that state department "recommendations" are the least absurd of an overall absurd response.)

[nradov]

That would not be a correct presumption. Americans who travel to New Zealand are not at all representative of the general population. For one thing they are significantly more affluent on average. I suspect they're also older, and less likely to be suffering from severe chronic co-morbid conditions. For example, end-stage renal disease patients were heavily overrepresented among US COVID-19 deaths. Not many such people would get on a 16 hour flight to Auckland under any conditions.

[LittleMoveBig]

That's all fine and I am broadly in support of the statement "people without major COVID risk factors should not take any special precautions or avoid travel to areas experiencing high case rates." My comment was simply addressed to the claim that the U.S. is currently doing much worse than New Zealand in some way that is relevant to travel advisories.

[throwaway6532]

I think NZ will fare better by orders of magnitude than the US because NZ had one of the best responses in the world and the US had one of the worst responses in the world.