I think New Zealand is rather famous for it's COVID response and recovery. Denmark and Finland also had great responses.

That said, I'm in the US and not well equipped to speak to their responses, having not experienced them first hand.

Finland’s was quite light touch, apart from the start where bars had to shut along with schools and WFH, ‘lockdown’ here was not in the same league as say the UK or France. There never were and are not now enforceable mask mandates and the more empty parts of the country have been restriction free for most of the year.

Maybe it was luck, a sparse population or of course the often repeated ‘everyone always does what they’re told’ (hmmm). Also it started off well but things have become quite fragmented recently (different agencies issuing rules about different things at different times, in different regions, much to the dismay of anyone trying to plan anything). In short, whilst interesting, there’s not really any useful comparison that you can make between the US and Finland in my opinion.

Both New Zealand and Finland have very low population density. UK and France have 10 times more people per square mile.

The density people live at isn't "very low", they mostly live in towns and cities.

Objectively the population density of Helsinki [1] is half that of London [2] - and according to google, a tenth of that of Paris.

Subjectively after living in both Helsinki and London it feels like Helsinki is even less crowded. I would say that there are fewer people who commute in to commercial areas from outside of the city than in London, and the commercial areas such as offices are generally a lot less dense, newer, and more spread out.

[1] https://www.hel.fi/hel2/tietokeskus/julkaisut/pdf/19_06_14_H... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

Yeah, it's still not 'very low'. The population density of the town I live in, which is not 'very low', is ~400 per square km. The county, which is denser than most of the area of the US, is 12 per square km.

After initial severe restrictions, yes. No.

Which countries are those?

New Zealand is an example. Auckland has an outbreak right now and has relatively severe restrictions again, but the rest of the country has very few restrictions beyond mask use. My life would have been impacted far less had I been in Auckland instead of a big city in the US.

You made my point for me. Even New Zealand, the one country everyone likes to point to as having beat COVID, has lockdowns today.

Sure and in my opinion it’s a better system for me personally and if I had an in-person business my balance sheet would prefer it too. All to obscure an incredibly important point that their death toll has been minimal, under 50 as far as I can see. USA is nearing 700,000.