Summarised by Centrist
A new chart shows that last month, NZ began experiencing far more deaths per million than other Oceania countries. The surprising revelation has Dr Robert MacCulloch calling NZ’s COVID response a potentially “unmitigated disaster.”
MacCulloch is a Macroeconomics professor at Auckland University, economics author and former NZ government advisor.
His latest opinion piece offers two charts – the first shows the underreported fact that NZ’s confirmed COVID deaths per million rate overtook Oceania in April 2024. The second chart reminds readers that NZ’s cumulative confirmed COVID cases per million people began to exceed Oceania rates in March 2022.
“The line folks like [former PM Chris] Hipkins and [former Deputy PM Grant] Robertson used that they saved ‘lives and livelihoods’ is political rhetoric,” he writes.
Citing the WHO COVID Dashboard as his source of information, MacCulloch argues NZ’s economy is currently suffering due to NZ’s government response to COVID. He writes “Maybe much of our claimed ‘success’ was simply due to being an island far away from the rest of the world.”
