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