> Its likely illegal for California to close its borders to Florida.

I wonder if that's really the case. A year ago I'd say the same for Australia. Yet most Australian states closed their borders at some point as a response to local cases spiking. (I agree it's less practical in the US, but I do wonder about the legality)

Whatever the answer I feel like it would take the courts a few weeks at least to figure it out. California (or more realistically Hawaii) could have had a full three week border closure before anyone settled the case law.

They certainly could have “closed” the border but how effective would it have been?

How many road cross into CA? How many open fields? You’d need an army of hundreds of thousands to ensure nobody crosses.

Not very many roads enter California, as it has natural geological borders. An ocean to the west, hilly forest to the north. On the east, a 3 km high mountain range which leads into a hot desert, cut by the mighty Colorado. The terrain is a lot more forgiving to the south, but there’s an artificial border with Baja California there.

Plus, most of the infrastructure is there for the agricultural inspection stations. Just use it to stop human disease instead of plant disease.

Logically that makes sense but we can't even seem to secure our southern border with Mexico.

And interestingly there are only 16 agricultural stations for all of California. They are only in place at major highways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S...

And if I kind of zoom into Google maps I count 36 crossing between the Oregon/California border just between the Pacific ocean and I-5. Sure, a lot of those are probably logging roads and such, but that's just a 60 mile stretch.

I mean it’s not like the inter state borders in Australia aren’t absolutely huge, too...

Maybe they could build a wall.

I do not live in the US, but I love that your system allows you guys to have effectively 51 experiments on how to deal with the spread of a virus, and see the results of every strategy. Do you really think that, if you can't even control your borders between states, your border on the south with Mexico for instance, would ever be effectively controlled to avoid the virus to come through it? The complete failure of California (even when compared to states where the demographics tend more to the older generations) tells me everything that is needed to understand if the lockdown approach works or not.

California is far from a monolith, though. Alameda County, where I live, hasn't been that bad, and has had a strong lockdown policy. Other parts of california have larger populations of anti-maskers. And the California prison system has been a complete disaster, largely because of incompetence and inhumanity in the administration.