The only common way into New Zealand is a flight or an occasional ship. NZ has no immediately neighboring countries that it runs freight trucks to and from day in and day out, and it doesn't need to move large numbers of agricultural workers around internationally. Therefore, for New Zealand traffic is obviously going to be smaller and easier to control than European countries.
That article says 14,000 workers/year from just the Pacific. Not sure of the total, and it's probably not large by European standards.
Our borders have been very effectively closed the last few weeks though. The fact that 56 Avatar film crew people have just been let in (on a chartered flight, after testing negative, and now spending 14 days in quarantine) has been quite contentious: https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington/121681...
There may be reasons why you would choose not to close the borders, but it's a choice.
Croatia has not had a single case of COVID-19 for 3 days in a row [1], and has been allowing citizens of several European countries, including ones like Germany, come there [2], since mid-May.
This stuff is not rocket science, and while Croatia will not completely eradicate COVID-19, which is unfortunate, it still is impressive.
[1] https://koronavirus.hr/en [2] https://koronavirus.hr/frequently-asked-questions-and-answer...
The fact that Sweden does not have a coronavirus hotspot as a neighbour further indicates that the Croatian outcomes have been much better.
Not really. Sweden has a low population density (23/km²) because most of the country has no one living there. The Stockholm region, where the spread of the virus has been the highest, has a population density of 5200/km².
(Numbers from wikipedia)
More relevant measures would be things like urbanization, where Sweden is number 23 in the world and Croatia number 104 (by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country). Or, perhaps, the population density of the most dense areas (5,200/km2 for Stockholm, 4,055/km2 for Zagreb). These are just examples of possible metrics, of course there are many more which might be more relevant, but population density of the entire country has no relevance at all.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/economy/may-jobs-report-previ...
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/416633/budget-2020-50bn...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/121704549/almost-half-of-re...
It is not feasible to lock down Brazil or Mexico - more people would die because of the lockdown.
As for the Swedish approach - the rest of the world hates it primarly because long term it might just prove that the lockdowns were both ineffectual and unnecessary perhaps even more damaging.
This is already what it's looking like when comparing across states in the US.
OTOH I agree that lockdowns in many countries have been very poorly done. In particular, a lot of countries have used lockdowns as a delaying tactic with no clear strategy for eliminating the virus or avoiding endless cycles of infection and lockdown --- certainly no clearly communicated strategy. In those cases, indeed a relaxed lockdown with more infection might be better in the long term.
NZ's tourism industry is a large chunk of their GDP and will be reduced significantly until borders are open again. Re-opening borders after elimination is political suicide as all you need is one person to start the whole thing again.
Surely once you have opened the borders it is only a matter of time for a new case to be imported (if you look at NSW right now, we've had a week of no local transmission but near-daily new cases for returned travellers, who are luckily in forced quarantine).
You could force-quarantine everyone for 14 days but I would not call that an 'open' border and it wouldn't do much to help the tourism industry.
This is a strategy that has worked well to fight other communicable diseases for which there is no vaccine.
How do you do that though? People arrive at the airport and take a taxi or train to a hotel? Thst's how a lot of the early spread started in Sweden: tourists returned from skiing in the italian alps in the last week of February, and infected taxi drivers.
The hotels are paid for and organised by the government and are guarded to ensure no one goes in/leaves, so I assume the transport to the hotels is also tightly monitored and the safety of drivers is ensured.
I believe China has similar procedures.
Before the hotels we had self-quarantine and that actually caused an Uber driver to become infected when he drove a cruise ship passenger home.
Other affected industries are international students and TV/film production. We will be admitting people for those with at least a 14-day quarantine and testing. That's not much fun but if you're a student or a media producer NZ looks like a particularly good destination at this time.
All assuming we can keep COVID down, of course, which we shouldn't take for granted.
Yeah, our economy's going to hurt, but countries wracked by ongoing COVID and various levels of lockdown for the forseeable future will suffer worse.