New Zealand Launches Another Strict Lockdown After 4 Test Positive for COVID
Two weeks to flatten the curve sounded reasonable enough to many back in March, when a foreign illness that most people knew very little about was spreading through the population like wildfire.
The coronavirus was scary and had a sky-high mortality rate, we were led to initially believe.
Our collective decision to fight the deadly disease by staying home, or working together apart, was somewhat of a short-term social contract between all of us.
That contract expired not long after we entered into it.
Being forced by government to stay home is wholly un-American, and so in this country, after that two weeks became six weeks, and then 10 weeks in some places, many people rightfully became upset.
What is the cost, some asked, of giving away rights to government by ceding choices about our own behavior to government officials, many who would prove to us by June that the lockdowns were not about equal application or science — not after we watched rioters being celebrated for rioting.
Somewhere along the way, the narrative about flattening the initial curve became one that was more or less, “Stay inside until there is a cure and Joe Biden can emerge from his basement as our leader.”
Many Americans still have that mindset, while others are living life as normally as possible.
The coronavirus can be deadly, as we know. But we have learned much about it over the last five months, including who is most vulnerable to facing complications after contracting it.
Still, in the time between March and where we sit now, we’ve been told to look at other countries in order to catch a glimpse at what social responsibility looks like, as our relatively free country wasted little time politicizing the virus.
Occupants of small island countries with no land borders such as New Zealand, we were told, were models for behavior.
New Zealand, with a population of only 4.9 million, is a small group of islands well-positioned to manage a health crisis.
The country did beat the coronavirus for a little while with draconian lockdowns by forcing healthy people to stay indoors.
But this week a resurgence in cases was reported, and now the measures to counteract it have grown more draconian.
Four new cases were reported in the country, and so Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered the country’s largest city of Auckland to completely shut down Wednesday, according to Reuters.
“This is something we have prepared for,” Ardern told reporters. “We have had a 102 days and it was easy to feel New Zealand was out of the woods. No country has gone as far as we did without having a resurgence. And because we were the only ones, we had to plan. And we have planned.”
The prime minister also announced on Facebook that the four new cases meant that anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus, and their families, will be interned at quarantine camps and held there until they test negative.
“What do we do if someone refuses to be tested?” she asked rhetorically.
“Well, they can’t now,” she answered, using a smile and a sunny disposition to let her citizens know they have no say in what might happen to them if they test positive for the coronavirus.
How do you expose a dictator, make them act like one. pic.twitter.com/xYA9oaCIVb
— reddpill (@_reddpill) August 12, 2020
Big Brother can come in many forms, including one of a pretty 40-year-old woman who pronounces the word “tests” in a way which some Americans might find humorous.
But behind the vivacious facade, Ardern is little more than a representative of a government that is going beyond overreach.
Ardern represents a country that Americans have been told we are supposed to view as a model.
That country is now going to put and hold people in facilities against their will, and lock down others at home — again.
Ardern is the same leader who pushed confiscating most legally owned semi-automatic firearms away from New Zealanders last year after a maniac in Christchurch went on a shooting spree at a pair of mosques and killed 51 people.
Democrats have been hoping to accomplish the feat of gun confiscation here for decades, and they plan to move forward with it, should we elect them in November.
Democrats also ask us to look abroad for answers regarding how to act to slow the spread of coronavirus infections here.
But if New Zealand, a lightly populated country with no physical borders for leftists to demand to remain open, can’t keep the coronavirus away from its shores — even with its draconian rules — what does that say about our chances?
New Zealanders achieved 102 days of being coronavirus free.
But the virus came back, and so did the government’s oppressive response.
Perhaps the coronavirus is with us to stay until either a working vaccine is distributed, we reach herd immunity or both.
In any event, New Zealand, a supposed model country, couldn’t stop the coronavirus, despite being isolated with distant neighbors Australia to the west and Antarctica to the south.
Americans are probably going to have to live with the reality that the coronavirus is out there, as are other illnesses and hazards.
New Zealand, for all its zeal, didn’t have the answers.
Neither do those in this country who have called for our leaders to behave like Ardern.
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