Science and Literature complimenting one another in an argument

 From How the Virus Penetrated Fortress New Zealand by Phillip W. Magness.  New Zealand has been the darling of the coercive ideological statist approach to Covid-19 control.  They have shut down their country and bankrupted the economy for several months now.  The benefit is that they have only had 22 deaths so far.  

Critics have pointed out that the sympathetic mainstream media was creating a delusion.  Yes, New Zealand's closure of its own border to just about everyone very early on has helped constrain the advent of the disease.  But, those critics claim, the absence of significant exposure so far has been substantially the product of New Zealand's remoteness and absence of material interaction with other populations.  

The critics claim that all the domestic shutdown has been so much Kabuki theater with no benefits and the real measure of government effectiveness will come when Covid-19 finally takes root.  In one recent paper, the claim was that after 25 Covid-19 deaths, all countries then see the same shark spike in deaths followed by a slow and then accelerating decline.  

New Zealand - A success story or merely a late victim?  The press has been all in for the former but reality is probably going to be more like the latter.  The government may still end up doing well by not doing stupid things such as placing Covid-19 contagious victims in the same facilities as the ill and elderly.  But its leadership inclination towards dictatorial and coercive action over democratic or science led decision-making does not bode especially well.  

The article above is a good workmanlike dismantling of the argument that the coercive and economically shattering of the New Zealand economy were necessary actions.  It is worth a read simply for its factual content.

What I especially enjoyed, though, was the architecture of the piece.  Interleaved among the elements of his argument, Magness highlights passages from Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death.  It is a markedly entertaining and effective conjoining of the two cultures, the art of literature with the argument of science.