It's not clear that it has been. Singapore was at that point, until a sudden spike in new cases overwhelmed them and they had to lock down. South Korea just re-closed their bars and pushed back school reopenings, because a single guy started a cluster of 80 cases and they don't trust their contact tracing to handle that many. Taiwan and Vietnam are either lucky or have better strategies than simply "do a lot of contact tracing", but in either case it's not obvious that other countries can replicate their success.

It's not eradication, but it's a much more fine-grained tool that lets some of the economy open back up in a safer way. It's what we should be aiming for everywhere.

The US might not be able to do quite as well, but it feels like we're barely even trying.

Agreed. But everywhere I know of, including Texas, is indeed aiming to do lots of contact tracing so opening up the economy is safer.

So we're seeing two different methods: Sweden (and I guess soon, the UK and the rest of the world) taking measures to slow the spread, but realizing it will spread to everyone.

South Kora, New Zealand, etc where they are going for complete elimination. Now ask yourself this ... when will South Korea or NZ be able to reopen their borders? They will have little to no immunity, so possibly not for a year or more.

> They will have little to no immunity, so possibly not for a year or more.

That last bit is a moot point. Herd immunity is not something we aspire to here in the United States. Even if infection results in immunity, which has not been proven yet, the number of people infected in the US that would be needed for herd immunity would involve millions of people dying.

> So we're seeing two different methods: Sweden (and I guess soon, the UK and the rest of the world) taking measures to slow the spread, but realizing it will spread to everyone.

I expect that's a pretty cartoonish reading of Sweden's public policy. (The UK's public policy is cartoonish lately, but they've definitely backed away from "let's all get sick.")

I think it might be fairer to say it was possible for countries that caught it early enough, and responded quickly enough to prevent it spreading out of control.

Unfortunately, I think it's a bit too late for the USA to do that now.

We're a long way from that being proven.

This is a strawman! You're right, nobody has shown eradication. But there are examples of control, with a straightforward set of techniques for getting there. It is difficult and requires competency to execute those techniques, but we should be coming together to do those difficult things and demanding competent execution of them from our leaders. There is really no excuse to do otherwise at this point, long after other countries have already done the work to cut through the uncertainty and demonstrate a much more successful approach.

But we aren't doing this, we're instead bickering incessantly and fatalistically rationalizing a much worse outcome than necessary. It is a deep deep historical failure of leadership.

Apart from Taiwan, who locked down travel from China in Dec-Jan even _before_ the WHO declaimed that "no human to human transmission is possible", can you please let me know which country has successfully eradicated Coronavirus ?

I think 'eradication' was a bad term and shouldn't be the focus in the US, because that's very, very difficult.

Isn't New Zealand almost entirely free of it at this point?