Heatley on Covid

The Productivity Commission's Dave Heatley blogged on some of his work on Covid policy.

His conclusions?

Cross-country data does not support a health vs. the economy framing of responses to Covid. Nor does the data support a get health right and the economy will follow.

Achieving the lowest health costs over both the short and long term requires choosing policies that work in protecting citizens from Covid while minimising economic costs.

New Zealand should seek to improve its policies, finding those that work at lower economic cost. It is likely that we can learn much from Taiwan, South Korea and other high-performing countries.

Keeping Covid down seems necessary but not sufficient for economic recovery. That of course isn't an argument against keeping Covid down. 

There is a lot that New Zealand has gotten right. But we also have missed a lot of opportunities to do rather better.

Heatley will be presenting on some of this work tomorrow.