I feel it will be hard to top yesterday’s picture (and no, I don’t plan to be taking all my clothes off on social media at any time in the near or far future for spurious fame or other notoriety), so I am back to infoblogging today.

A friend asked whether it was true that New Zealand is one of only 4 countries currently in lockdown, and whether we one of a very few first world countries that don’t have 100% of population (minus children and antivaxxers) fully vaccinated. Let’s take each question one at a time.

Is New Zealand one of only 4 countries in lockdown? It depends what you define by a ‘lockdown’. Rather than differentiate between locked down, and not, Oxford University has developed a ‘Stringency Index’ for measures that countries are taking to mitigate the effects of COVID-19. According to this Index we are definitely way up there in the stakes right now. We have a stringency of 85, beaten only by Venezuela at 86. Suriname is close behind at 83 and Malaysia at 81. However, there a number of countries in the 70s, including China, France, Argentina, Chile, Iran, Uzbekistan, Libya, Kenya and Botswana. All of these countries are closing workplaces, public events, restricting scale of gatherings and requiring people to stay at home to some degree.

Are we a rare developed country that doesn’t have the majority of the population vaccinated, other than children and anti-vaxxers? One problem with the question is that no-one knows the proportion of the population who are anti-vax, or are hesistant vaxxers. One approach, would be to define that proportion by the number of people who aren’t vaccinated after a country has had a significant vaccination campaign with sufficient vaccine available for all of the population to get vaccinated. We certainly couldn’t define that in New Zealand yet. However, we can look at our leaderboard standing on vaccinations, including on the OurWorldInData website. It looks like we are at around the 1/3 from bottom mark.

However, the above picture is for the whole world. Where are we at in terms of the developed world? I don’t know the answer because when I started to click on the little boxes to select countries, I realised I didn’t know what the definition of the developed world might be. I did my best to select appropriate countries. The result was that we look even worse, at the top of the bottom quarter.

On the question of what is the possible maximum number of people vaccinated, or how many people will refuse to get vaccinated, that will depend on country and culture. The proportion of under 15s (who can’t currently be vaccinated)ranges widely, from the high teens in countries I counted as developed, to over 40% in e.g. Eritrea or Afghanistan.

It looks like we also aren’t going to get to know why we are so far behind. Our vaccinators have kept pace with the vaccine supplies coming to New Zealand, but we have received supplies a lot more slowly than many other countries. There is little evidence that we were being kind and leaving doses for less developed countries, like is sometimes alluded to. by government.However, the nature of the deal with Pfizer is being kept confidential so we have no idea what resulted in us being relegated to a back seat.

At this point, all we can do is keep putting vaccines into arms to get us up the leaderboard. Not to mention, hope that our lucky streak from 2020 means that this iteration of Delta variant infection has spread as widely as it is going to (it’s currently looking promising), and therefore by next week only a part of New Zealand will be in a Level 4 lockdown (sorry Auckland and Wellington).