It's the willingness and ability to take effective measures, not the geography, that matters.
Australia has a lower population than California, by the way. Obviously, its pop is mostly spread over the east coast, but compared to the UK it's extremely sparse, with no tunnels connecting it to the mainland. It's disingenuous (at best) to think that the island nations that had successful lockdowns were all doing something magically better than other places with significant restrictions to daily life like France, Italy, California, etc. because they couldn't realistically close their borders to ground traffic.
And obviously you can close a land border as well, it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it. Australia also imposed tight restrictions on most of the land borders between states.
Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).
(One of the world's biggest airports, several of Europe's busiest, frequent direct rail connection to the continent, frequent ferries on many routes, fully integrated free trade + work zone.)
"According to Getlink, the company which operates the Channel Tunnel, 1.64 million trucks traveled between the UK and the EU using the crossing last year. More than 2.5 million cars made the crossing, as did 51,229 buses and 2,012 freight trains.
Added to the even greater volumes of truck crossings made on ferries — the Port of Dover handled a record 2.6 million trucks in 2017, according to its own figures — it accounts for a massive annual volume."
People love to make excuses or put up obstructions to an idea, but solutions are almost always achievable with a little planning, resources and the will to make it happen.
Our (UK) response has been a bit of a clusterfuck so far, we're not a good example to judge by.
Barnard Castle alone probably killed thousands, the way this government is doing contracts is probably criminal, we fucked up the T&T for months etc. etc. etc. etc.
Voting Mr Bean into office would constitute a comedy of errors; but what we have now (when you also throw Brexit into the mix) is far from funny.
> time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective
.. lies roughly from Feburary to the present day. No reason to allow travel from countries with significant prevalence.
> all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse
[citation needed]
[citation needed]
Let's reverse the burden of evidence, and request [citation needed] for your implicit claim that the open borders lobby is not relevant here?
> the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive,
I'd argue that these were very much the wrong-thinking people. And that the WHO advice has been pretty terrible throughout. It seems obvious to me that closing borders is appropriate in a pandemic. The UK still hasn't done this. Lots of people were going abroad on holiday between lockdowns.
I'm not familiar with freight in Europe, so please excuse the diversion.
They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries? I'm guessing this isn't containerized freight, which would seem to make sense to transfer to freight rail (at least to cross the channel).
With the very porous border, there is little lost time through checks -- it was easy to send the driver all the way from Germany to Manchester. I think from leaving the French motorway to driving onto the British one takes about an hour by lorry-on-train.
By ferry, it's little different than going from Germany to Denmark by ferry. They will glance at the passport as well as the ticket.
Boarding the train : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8r0kjJvvIY
(Cars go on a different train, enclosed and you stay in your car.)
Both, although more volume goes through the ferries. (tunnel trains is 1.5 million trucks a year or something in that ballpark if I remember correctly)
“To put this into context, there are about 6,000 vehicles we would expect, just under in Dover today, probably I’d say 4,000 would have gone across from Dover, just under 2,000 on the Eurotunnel,” he said.
“But there’s probably something like 32,000 units that would have been the daily total so the vast majority including virtually all the vaccine actually comes via container.”
Containers will mostly be on ships, but some will come on normal freight trains. (Eurotunnel is the lorries-on-trains service.)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/france-ban-uk-...