Yes I agree. Canada has a long border but just with one country. So think it’s in a good position. It’s way more difficult for a European country for example.

It's not that difficult for most European countries.

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.

You obviously don’t live in mainland Europe. I can easily cross borders in a small village, on a field, through a forest. There are no fences. Sometimes you don’t even have a line.

It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania

>> Canada can still close her borders

This was already done and the infection rates are still sky high.

With closed borders, Canada is basically an island like Australia, NZ and the UK.

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?

Key detail here is likely that it should have been done early enough. Once the virus is inside it is very hard to contain. Specially when asymptomatic carrier are common. Chain of them can keep virus alive and spreading for weeks or months.

Yeah its much easier to do before the numbers spike. Some analysis I heard recently said if you do a lockdown, delaying by 1 day at the outset leads to locking down a whole extra week at the other end.

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.