The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Catastrophe

Re:The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Cata... by josephg on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:35AM (#25978341)

Yeah I agree there are no other western countries with zero covid except a couple island nations. There's also no other countries which have seriously tried to get covid to 0 except some island nations - which is interesting.

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.

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Re:The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Cata... by baxtr on Sunday January 31, 2021 @11:03AM (#25979741)

I agree with you. The most important difference is policy. And I also think the EU should have acted very differently. They should have been way quicker and more decisive.

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.

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Re:The Virus Changed. Now We Must ‘Get to Zero’ or Face Cata... by josephg on Sunday January 31, 2021 @05:40PM (#25983337)

Yeah I get that, and I understand that that would make it difficult for individual nations to work alone. (Though not impossible - as other commenters have mentioned Australia successfully closed our internal borders.)

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.

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