I don't know about a New Zealand path, but I do think that there would have been a much more significant response.
Consider that to a significant degree, populations seem to be fairly good at maintaining COVID-19 spread to a constant rate (ie. an R_t of around 1). This seems to be based on feedback mechanisms that operate through hearing news of the virus, through official channels, mainstream media, and social media. For instance, if you hear that the government is telling you not to go out and that the hospitals are full and that many people are dying, you will likely comply, but once those are working, you will become less cautious, causing the cycle to repeat.
I would suspect based on this that a more dangerous disease (either higher IFR or higher infectivity) would result in more cautious behavior, likely causing a flatter behavior rather than the peaks that we have had with COVID-19, but the response would be substantially the same. That said, if it was especially more dangerous (black death or smallpox levels), then a substantially different response might be possible.
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This isn't the flu. America has had 318,000 deaths so far. That's ~8.5 years worth of flu deaths. One of those years was from the last 26 days. If the world had America's almost 1 death per 1,000 people mortality rate, that would be about 7.8 million deaths. There are 1.7 million deaths globally. That's 6 million people spared! And frankly America is in at least a half banked lockdown.
If your country has almost no cases, that isn't something to complain about. Mass graves would mean that your country had failed to the point that they were having difficulty manages all of the corpses. This point will vary country to country, but it is a lot harder for a first world country to hit that point than you seem to think.
I'll just copy my comment on a Zvi's post:
the Covid-19 mortality rate is in the Goldilocks zone for allowing (bad) choices:
As it is, 0.5%-3% mortality rate is exactly the wrong number, since the right decision is not immediately obvious to everyone. And so we have the largest number of overall deaths and the largest damage to the economy possible from anything short of Oryx & Crake-style plague.
Thank you all for answering. I generally concur that the IFR and response are related. The current feedback mechanism cannot be a coincidence.
Relative to other pandemics and our initial fears, Covid has a low infection fatality rate (IFR). The IFR varies between societies depending on age and obesity distributions, such that it was more severe in the US than in India. Estimates of the US initial IFR are about .5% of infected persons.
Some American persons have not complied with social distancing guidelines and some states have refused to apply restrictions. Justifications vary. Some argue that the virus is not severe enough and we are over-preventing Covid (example 1, example 2). Others argue that lockdowns violate some moral/political right or whatever (example).
If the virus were more severe such that all IFR's were increased, would the US people have responded differently? At a 5% IFR with no change infectivity would a would a New Zealand path become likely?