Paying Attention to the Auckland Details

Why pay attention to the Auckland outbreak at all? It's pretty small. It's half a world away. And what the heck king of name is Auckland anyway?

First off, since January, I've emphasized that the pandemic will have macroeconomic effects. Gee, did it ever.

Second, the whole process of an outbreak generates time series data that my macroeconomics students are trained to handle.

But those are generic reasons. The third reason, and the one specific to this outbreak, is that it will generate unusually clean data. New Zealand has been the most aggressive country in stamping out the virus, albeit temporarily. And this new outbreak in Auckland started with one guy, and then his family. New Zealand has had other cases while this is going on, but all of them are inside isolation facilities (you have to sit in quarantine for 14 days before entering the country). And the strain of the virus is one that has not been seen in New Zealand before, and is relatively rare in the rest of the world. So what they have is community transmission, in the wild, of a single isolated outbreak, in a developed country that's prepared for the worst.

Here's what's happened.

• New Zealand, again, has gone crazy with restrictions. Auckland is on (their) level 3, and the whole country is on level 2. They have police checkpoints outside Auckland.
• New Zealand, again, has gone crazy with testing: 710K tests since February, or about 20% of the population.
  
• They are almost 3 weeks into this outbreak (at least since the first symptoms were noticed) and have not been able to get it under control. They have 113 cases in total.
  
• They are still finding new cases every day: 5 today.
  
• They are worried about a superspreader event: they now have 12 positive cases from around 400 people who attended church services around the time of the first positive test in this outbreak, but after symptoms were apparent.
• They are now getting positives amongst people who were exposed to those infected, but who were quarantined because they tested negative.
• They have 11 people in the hospital, and 3 in ICU. No deaths yet.

Once again, this is not just like the flu: with the flu, you don't have 10% of the infected being hospitalized, nor 2.65% being admitted to the ICU.