This tracks. Hawaii still has the lowest COVID in all of the US, and even the city (note: not the county) of alameda has the lowest COVID rate in all cities in the bay area (it's kind of a pain in the ass to get to). Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, are all islands. And South Korea is... politically an island.

Definitely true, and that's also one of the reasons Australia has had it so mildly on the global scale. South Australia has had, I think, only four deaths, and this unbelievably low number is, I think, one of the benefits of being on the island of Australia, and not being particularly recognised as a tourist destination in the way Sydney and Melbourne and various part of Queensland are.

ie. South Australia has the ocean borders of Australia and the psychological borders of unpopularity. The combination of which has proven incredibly effective.

Everyone says this because it makes sense at first glance, but does it really? Did the US get most of its infections from people driving over from Canada and Mexico? A virus from China or South Africa spreads by planes, not cars.

Fair enough, I should have said “be a small island”. Obviously everything changes when you’re dealing with a population two orders of magnitude that of New Zealand: it’s harder to secure ports, harder to control contagion internally, etc. Moreover, the US never even attempted to harden its ports until the virus was already spreading out of control.

That said, the US has a lot of people crossing its land borders—even if it completely hardened its ports, outlawed border crossings, and was much better at reducing internal contagion, it would still have to deal with thousands of people who cross illegally and who aren’t going to quarantine for two weeks or abide by any kind of contact tracing programs.

Thailand did well with a zero Covid policy until Delta, and has plenty of land border

“Being an island helps” doesn’t mean “the only thing that helps is being an island”.