Even among identified cases, we did not put even a small dent in the rate of new daily cases until the very end of 2020: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
It's so tiring engaging with the public about this. No.
Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
But it simply didn't happen. At all in fact, once you look at the whole world. And all of this is based on reported data. We never got a clear picture of what unknown transmission looked like. If I had to guess, it was many-fold worse.
You need to keep it low enough, for long enough, with no reservoir. It's the last part that's the problem. You'd either need to prevent all travel for years, or arrange for everywhere in the world to take action at the same time. The latter is basically impossible.
I'm sorry, but no. Yes, this might work at an academic level, but dealing with the politics of the world and human nature, this thing that you ask cannot happen given the diversity of the politics and cultures of the world.
It's the same reason a carbon tax type system will never work, because there will be some subset of our world that would want to take advantage of a situation for their own financial gain, even if it hurts everyone else in the long run.
That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.