But.. they didn't beat it. It's not endemic, it's not "one of the common colds", it's a locked down island, where noone can enter or exit freely anymore. This is like hiding in a cave, and saying that you've beat the bear outside.

I understand the advantages to a global village but we rarely talk about the downsides. Perhaps the global village is a failed experiment and needs to be reconfigured into bubbles. Perhaps we need to move back to a protectism of sort.

But why? People prefer the freedom to a minor risk. When lockdowns stop, people don't stay in their home bubble, but go out and meet with people. Why? Because they weren't at home because they were afraid of the corona, but because they were forced by their governments. Looking at the current happenings in europe, sooner or later a critical mass will be reached somewhere, and some (political) heads will fall.

In general yes, closing people up inside, in separate rooms, giving them only the needed amount of calories, forbidding every even mildly dangerous sport, and of course driving and cycling, would save many lives. But who wants to live in a world like that?

Not being able to leave your house, and not being able to leave your country, aren’t the same. The difference in degree is big enough to count as a difference in kind.

Please don’t blame Australia for NSW’s mistake. The rest of us are facing a similar problem due to their state governments incompetence.

> they beat this and now they're going to have to do it again.

It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it a dozen times.

The point is that you can't just draw a line around obvious failure modes and say they're not part of the strategy. If you compare the median global response to "we beat the virus with a single lockdown!", that sounds like an obvious winner, but it's a much more equivocal story if you compare it to "we'll be doing snap lockdowns 1-2 times a year for the foreseeable future, and even then we may need to give up on elimination if one of the lockdowns doesn't work".

(As someone mentioned upthread, this shouldn't be seen as a slight against the people or leadership of New Zealand, who generally seem to understand that lockdowns weren't meant to be a one-and-done measure.)