The next govt will be a National govt...

[harm_less]

The US was probably one of the countries that suffered the greatest loss of life and economic health by letting COVID19 "run rampant" and they are now implementing economic measures to solve the results of that approach which is shaking other country's economic situations severely. NZ and many other countries are looking down the barrel of massive inflationary pressures due to the US's poor management of the last few years' events. We are far from being over the effects of COVID19 on many fronts (e.g. long COVID, struggling businesses, lifestyle changes) but at least our own government implemented measures that drastically limited the immediate health impacts of COVID19.

Imagine for a moment that we had suffered a 1% mortality rate. That's 50,000 lives. Are you really suggesting that we would be in a better situation if NZ had taken the largely uncontrolled approach that some countries did? Really!?

We have probably lost(or will loose) that many or more from the vaccine anyway, I have a relative that dropped dead (sudden adult death syndrome?) perfectly fit and healthy, the doctors "think" it was his heart that gave out, but they didnt perform any form of autopsy to figure out the cause of death.
1% mortality rate was probably the worst case for an outbreak of the original Alpha strain, and mostly with elderly people with serious health conditions, notice why all the rest homes had the most fatalities, e.g rosewood, while virtually no cases in MIQ ever dies from covid?
I know things were bad in the US, but were still bad in Australia and Europe too.

NZ had some of the toughest restrictions, but our main advantage was we were an isolated country landlocked at sea.

Our isolation was a big advantage as it provided us with both insulation from imported exposure and a delay factor that allowed us to learn from other country's (bad) strategies. We made good use of these factors by designing our COVID19 strategy to capitalise on these factors. That's the reason we rate 125th in the COVID deaths per 1M of population. We could have done so much worse.

Sort the 'Deaths /1m population' column to see a ranking in that respect: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries (Incidentally USA is 16th and Aussie 126th FWIW).

Right from the start COVID found the weakest in terms of health in a per person basis but also the weaknesses in so many other aspects (e.g. businesses' coping ability, healthcare sector's limitations, society's resilience to crisises, governments' ability to ensure their citizens' safety, the wisdom of rapid international travel, etc). The virus has far from finished with us and you can be sure there will be more coming along real soon so best treat this one as a test run because the next episode may well be a whole lot more transmissible and/or lethal.