Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
All of the European countries were able to implement border controls as the Schengen Borders Code permits.
They easily could have had a mandatory 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals and had a similar result to Australia and New Zealand. They chose instead to mimic themselves after Sweden and opted to contain rather than eliminate the virus. Even now Macron refuses to impose a lockdown.
Maybe the real difference is that we're an island. But much more likely is our different public policies. And if you need evidence, the UK is an island (like Aus/NZ) with policies more like the US and - surprise! They have case numbers more similar to the US than similar to Aus/NZ.
If you really think the island / continent thing is relevant, I'm excited to hear the story of why the US's covid disaster is somehow actually canada and mexico's fault.
Maybe it’s because they’re islands, and maybe you’re right and it’s because of the policy in place. I believe it’s the former, because it’s way more difficult to control influx of people in a connected economy like the EU for example.
It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I'm convinced the most important difference is policy, but I wonder if there might be some psychological effect of living on an island all by yourself which makes you think "Well, can we just pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?". Those thoughts might be harder to think in Europe.
> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.
I think Canada could drive covid down to zero by closing the US border, then enforcing strict lockdowns. (And apparently they have closed the border to the US.) I think the US or the UK could do the same if they wanted at a national level. Well, at least in theory. I acknowledge it would be much more difficult to do the same in a small european nation. At least, it would be difficult to do it alone.
However, bear in mind that Europe has become super interconnected in the last decade or so. There are millions crossing borders to work on the other side. Germany is a great example. Those counties close to the Czech border had way higher incidence levels, most probably due to the constant exchange with Czech Republic.
But you aren't in this alone. If Europe worked together, and your neighbors adopted similar policies it would have worked fine and covid would be under control by now.
The fact that you aren't on an island doesn't excuse the EU's bad covid policy decisions, at both the scale of individual countries and as a collective body.
This is exactly what Western Australia did. The Australian response was not nationally coordinated and each state has been doing their own thing. They have land borders between each other and yet the Victorian outbreak didn't spread to either NSW or SA because they implemented border checks by lining the roads with police and fining people who attempted to circumvent them, while WA implemented a hard border even earlier as soon as there was a non-zero number of cases.
The Australian states are geographically larger than many European countries, so I don't think it's that it's an island. The only effect nationally was hotel quarantine for arriving flights which is possible for landlocked countries as well.
It shouldn't also be noted that the borders don't have to be hermetically sealed. As long as cross border contamination is minimized other tools (contact tracing) can deal with it.
Europe has a lot more people living in much less space and much more integrated than isolated places with so much land like New Zealand and Australia.
> 2-week quarantine for all foreign approvals
This would grind EU to a halt. Tourism alone results in 750 million international tourists visiting EU a year. Counting travels of EU citizens between EU countries would result in billions.
Sure, island countries the population size of Croatia and Romania maybe can isolate. EU as a whole? Pfff
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...
Keep the (potentially) sick people on the "air side" of the airport terminal and then directly into quarantines on arrive at the final destination.
Those who bridge this gap (air crews, terminal staff) need to follow very strict measures (PPE, cleaning, regular testing) to make that work.
Perhaps more places need to decide they don't want to be a major transit hub during this pandemic? You know, restrict non-essential traffic a bit to make the essential traffic and local populace safer?
Well, if your country isn't a transit hub, then you avoid hub problems completely. If you are a hub, then you have additional problems that New Zealand doesn't, that you have to work to mitigate.
People are going to be crossing borders at relatively few and well understood locations.
And they could've simply imposed large fines for anyone who tried to sneak through.
It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania
This was already done and the infection rates are still sky high.
Lots of posters here seem convinced that being an island makes it easy to control covid. If thats the most important factor, I'd love to hear some theories on why the numbers in canada aren't coming down to 0, like they have in Australia and NZ?
The numbers are coming down (slowly) in Montreal now that they have a strict lockdown. I think the process could work; but at this point it might take so long to get the numbers under control that people wouldn't tolerate it. Especially not when the vaccine feels so close. We'd be talking like, 4 months in a row of strict lockdown + business closures.
The other aspect is contact tracing. When numbers are very low, its much easier to do diligent contact tracing around every infected person. In the recent outbreak in Sydney they tracked down and personally contacted everyone they could place in the vicinity of an infected person and asked them to self isolate. By the time a handful of those people tested positive, most of them had already been isolating and as a result didn't infect anyone - which broke the chain of transmission. We could do that because the number of new cases was only around ~10/day. That would be way less feasible at Montreal's 1600 cases/day.