The claim becomes conveniently tautological when you equate "at scale" with "tracers getting overwhelmed". GP might argue that all successful tracing never reached scale. That would make it a completely worthless claim, but, well "truth" (big sarcasm quotes).

It completely broke down in Victoria, Australia when daily case numbers got into the hundreds, so a full lockdown was imposed.

It’s working fine again now that case numbers are negligible.

Worked to slow down the spread, but not to catch all cases. Remember the gay pub in South Korea?

Many people are not going to say they cheated on their SOs, or went to a swing bar, or a gay pub.

They didn't have to catch all cases. They reduced the fatality rate per capita by 90% compared to western countries. South Korea has less than 5% the cases per capita of the US.

I was referring to the following (grand)parent:

> I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing.

And Japan. To be fair, Aus and NZ caught their epidemics very early, and are islands.

Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of reverse contact tracing.

The big problem in the "West" (i.e. Europe and US) is that lots of people don't engage with the contact tracing system, which makes the epidemic almost impossible to control.

Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.

I keep hearing the 'they are islands' thing and it has never made much sense to me. Can you explain why being an island is intrinsically better than not being an island?

Does the size of the island matter? Does the location of the island matter? What if there are multiple islands?

Travel into islands is far harder than travel into cities in large land masses. You need to get a ticket on an airplane or a boat, which makes travel time a minimum of 1 hour usually and costs a whole bunch of money. This creates a natural barrier where people on islands don't interact with people on mainlands nearly as much.

Look into covid numbers and you'll notice cities even in the same country that are on an island of some sort have significantly less covid numbers, such as Hawaii or Vancouver Island in Canada.

How do you apply the “islands do better” logic to the UK or Hawaii? Hawaii might have done well by US standards, but it has performed badly compared to other islands. The UK has not done well.

Yes. Also Australia is an island, but Victoria (my state) peaked over 700 cases/day and other states during the same period managed to keep their case numbers controlled at the same time (~10 cases / day in NSW iirc). It wasn't magic. We closed the state borders, making each state basically its own island. Victoria imposed strict lockdowns to get the case numbers down and the rest of the country went about business as usual.

I don't see why the same strategy wasn't used in Europe or the US. Its hard to control a virus when there's a constant stream of new cases coming over the border. I suppose its way too late for that now.

The UK is a remarkably un-island-like island in terms of the frequency and ease of travel between it and the mainland.

In particular, the UK and France are connected by a high-speed train tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

The travel times quoted by that article: "London to Paris taking 2 hours 15 minutes, to Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes."

That's faster than some people's daily commutes into NYC.

Islands don't really matter, but closed borders do. Europe has very different policies and rates of spread, but open borders mean that no country in the EU can eradicate Corona if the rest doesn't eradicate it at the same time. Case in point, Germany was at practically zero (around 1% positive tests with a 1% false positive rate) 6 weeks ago, currently it is lagging 3 weeks behind all its neighbors in the number of cases, rising exponentially.

agreed. if anything, being an island would be worse because you have to condense a lot people into confined spaces just to cross the border

> Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.

The countries mentioned have had community transmission, but they use contact tracing, testing, and shutdowns to stop it.

How is north america not an island?

porous border with Mexico? and by the time it arrived it was too late.

if you say Mexico is in your definition of North America then it should include all of central america, almost all these countries have a lot of land-based trade.

In Canada we have not had any cases related to truckers, but there's a lot of them who have to do the cross-border route, as well as people who commute daily across the border. heck in Canada and the US there are a few spots where crossing the border is necessity -- the only school is in the other country, nearest hospital, the local library, a popular golf course, etc.

or places like point roberts, extremely small but extremely isolated, or Hyder, Alaska.

A sea border is used more for trade -- Australia trades nearly as much with China as Canada does with the US! This idea that islands are somehow LESS dependent on foreign trade is afactual, you can see it in the 2019 import/export figures. And people have been barred for US/Canada crossings for those reasons for months. And there's not a lot of Coronavirus coming from Canada... So really, what advantages does an island have?

It is a continent.

A primary landmass on its tectonic plate.

Plus it's connected to South America.

Not debating your point, but I want to point out that there is literally no overland travel between South America and North America because of the Darien Gap. If you want to get to the US from Bogota, you'll need to fly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

I guess the key point is being an “island” is not enough when you have 300M+ people with huge amounts of intermingling, and the virus has already taken hold.

Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.

> the virus was not widespread when the severity threat became apparent.

It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.

Yep, I lived through it.

I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on.

And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.

I thought there was a ferry there, but it only operated for three years!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucero_Express