Why America’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Failed: Lessons from New Zealand’s Success

Abstract

COVID-19 is the ultimate test of administrative law and governance, as every country faces the common challenge of saving lives from a virulent pandemic at a manageable cost to the economy.

Polls show that 48 percent of Americans think that COVID-19 posed an essentially impossible test and that the US has performed as well as most other countries in meeting the pandemic challenge. This Essay refutes that misperception. It shows that the U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate for 2020, adjusted for population, was more than twice as high as Canada’s and Germany’s; 40 times higher than Japan’s; 59 times higher than South Korea’s, and 207 times higher than New Zealand’s mortality rate despite over $2 trillion in U.S. deficit spending. In fact, U.S. performance at the level of South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan in containing the pandemic would have saved over 300,000 American lives in 2020 alone.

This Essay then offers a detailed comparison of the COVID-19 response of the Trump Administration to that of New Zealand, which mounted a truly successful response. While some observers have dismissed New Zealand’s success as an artifact of good luck -- or of its geographic situation as a small, rural, island state -- this Essay offers evidence to suggest that these distinctions are of marginal importance compared to a more crucial contrast: New Zealand followed the pandemic containment “playbook” to the letter while in the United States the Trump Administration departed from that playbook at every turn. Moreover, New Zealand’s response was centrally planned and tightly managed while the U.S. response was incoherent and de-centralized. The evidence thus strongly suggests that the tragic disparity between America’s COVID-19 performance and New Zealand’s is primarily due -- not to geography or happenstance -- but to a stark contrast in the pandemic response strategy adopted by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern compared to that of President Trump.

Keywords: COVID-19, Administrative Law, Comparative Administrative Law