> Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders.

Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.

The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there's an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn't help at all if you don't do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don't know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they're islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.

An important bit of information is Victoria indebted itself heavily to contain its outbreaks. The state is in $150B worth of debt and already increasing its taxes and fines to compensate.

It also had the largest exodus of people ever seen. About 11,000 leaving per quarter.

The fallout from businesses isn't know yet either, that'll become apparent after EOFY.

If being an island state was really the only thing that mattered here, why is Hawaii not at Covid zero? Why is Alaska not at Covid zero?

(Despite not being an island, AK is still highly comparable to OZ.)

It’s hard to appreciate just how strict the lockdown measures in places like New Zealand and Taiwan have been. People are driven from the airport directly to a hotel, then someone comes and checks on them and they monitor the front door. Even in Hawaii, the arrival quarantine was just in whatever resort you were staying in, and was almost entirely self-imposed.

On the other side of the coin, as someone in Australia I couldn't believe it when I heard that in many other countries you can "quarantine" in a house with other people who are free to go about their day! Of course that's not going to work...

Being an island might make it easier to close borders, but the point is that closing them was likely hugely significant. I'd argue that borders remained open in many countries areas largely due to a lack of will. You could certainly close borders to most tourists and business travelers in any country that does immigration control, like Australia did. You can also close interstate land borders, like Australia did. You can even close borders to major cities, like Australia did. You don't need to close borders to food deliveries, just budget for the logistical headaches. You do have to pay the political and economic cost though. Australia was watching with both envy and horror when we started seeing stories of British people able to go on holidays to Europe again.

> And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to

Maybe not perfectly, but surely the vast majority of traffic across land borders is at managed border crossings. The US could shut those down, put the army on any unmanaged roads/routes (don’t know if this is a thing) and stop 95% or more of land border traffic?

Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference to Covid - I don’t know about that, but I do question the impossibility claim.

The border is already closed (at least around here) to "non-essential travel". So, no crossing the border for vacationing. But "full" closure would mean blocking "essential" trade (food, oil/fuel, ...), and blocking "essential" workers that commute across the border. It could technically be done, but it'd be incredibly disruptive.

Even with full legal closure, the borders are porous enough for a border wall to have been a talking point in some previous election debates. Build a mile-tall wall out of mithril, and you'd still be left with a ton of unsecured coastline, connected by some rather convenient oceans...

Of the many things we didn't bother doing, closing the Mexican border probably didn't matter a lot.

Canada did greatly restrict the border!

Holy cow; what is the birth rate to let a country have an average age in the mid-teens?!

Well Uganda has a median age of about 17 and a birth rate of about 5 children per woman.

>>And the U.S. couldn't close its land borders even if it wanted to.

Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak, and it's a country comprised of hundreds of million of people among which about a third showed themselves to be quite defiant towards even the most trivial emergency public health policies, I don't think it's fair to refer to border control as a relevant factor in the US's death toll.

> Given that until recently the US was quite militant in refusing to act upon the outbreak

Factually untrue. The US was the first country to shut down China travel. And we got called Xenophobic for it. The mayor of Florence even held a “hug a Chinese” day in response.

https://rmx.news/article/article/fears-of-being-called-racis...

The US never shut down travel from China, it banned people not from the US from traveling from China to the US. US citizens and some other groups were still allowed to travel.

Singapore started severely restrict travel and quarantining arriving citizens a couple days before the US ban.

https://www.gov.sg/article/how-is-singapore-limiting-the-spr...

A faster travel ban for Italy and other EU countries would have done the US more good.

Factually true. Shutting down travel from China (at least for Chinese nationals, but not for Americans) after the virus was already openly spreading inside the country, and NOT shutting down travel from Europe, which was having a massive outbreak of its own, was xenophobic theater at best.