New Zealand had the advantage of having a huge amount of experience with protecting their biodiversity. I'm willing to bet a lot of that experience was transferrable to this situation.
Being an island. Yada yada. Has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the simple actions they took that we could repeat but some people don’t want to because they’ve been conned.
Being anti-mask and knowing it puts others at risk is purely an antisocial behavior. It’s a FU to everyone else. It costs nothing to do, it saves lives, and ironically is what would enable us to be as normal as we possibly can by controlling this thing. Being anti-mask and believing it doesn’t put others at risk is a sign they were conned by a few sociopaths who wanted to exploit this for their own political gain.
If you remember, this is exactly what China did. It failed because despite how hard you try to tell people that it's nothing to worry about, people will start to realize that hospitals are overrun. Your solution is not only demonstrably poor, but is also how we ended up in this mess. It's a tall order to tell people there's "nothing wrong" while nurses are working 12 hours shifts.