As long as you can keep your borders effectively shut for the next year or so I think you’ll be in great shape. That ship has sailed in the case of the US.

As I understand it, there is a bimodal approach to managing an epidemic. You’re on a totally different pathway of successful suppression, where you’ve never actually seen exponential community spread. Your endpoint is not herd immunity.

The US probably was seeing uncontrolled exponential community spread in ~January. There are major metro areas which have 20%+ prevalence. The only endpoint left for the US is herd immunity.

So you would not expect the same measures to be taken, as long as AU is striving to maintain suppression I think that means your local measures will have to remain quite a bit stricter than a country trying to obtain herd immunity as quickly as possible.

EDIT: (Since HN won’t let me reply) You’ve had a total of 6,700 detected cases and 63% of those were imported.

Your total community spread over this entire time was what we see in two days in Massachusetts.

You’ve done 500k tests total, the US is presently running 160k tests a day. Harvard just came out with a study saying they thought we would need to get to 5 million tests a day. This is what I mean by bimodal.