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.
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.
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)
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.
There may be reasons why you would choose not to close the borders, but it's a choice.
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...