When the United States of America can relocate to an island and near-permanently ban travel into the country like NZ has, we'll do that, I guess.
EDIT: Ah yes, HN the libertarian paradise unless it's about COVID, then the recommendations are non-practical authoritarian measures and citing island nation success and hurling downvotes. Keep them coming.
Sharing a land border with Victoria did not make it impossible for New South Wales or Victoria to get back to zero - and that's states, not countries, so the extent of the border infrastructure is a few "Welcome to Victoria" signs.
The former is a logistical nightmare in a collection of states that basically is not possible to carry out due to our incompetent government and the scale of international travel in the US being several orders of magnitude higher than Vietnam's per capita (and gross rates of course) and the latter won't work (and hasn't worked when we tried it) because our population is inherently distrustful of our government(s) and generally have the right to be that way.
Again, not all tools smaller countries have are available to larger ones, and vice versa (America/EU/etc have better access to vaccines as a plus, for example).
Apart from sectors like tourism, there wasn't anyone who truly felt "screwed over" by arbitrary rules.
- Shut down the highway off-ramps into towns with some sort of inter-state quarantine scheme (make this legal)
- Institute financial support for all non-essential businesses, then force them to close (cease in person trading) during lock-down
- Educate the populace on Covid details
It's not just about strong walls or deep oceans. We're not talking about a zombie apocalypse here. Stop making excuses.
"Make this legal" is a pretty hand-wavy way to say that it isn't legal and isn't likely to become legal. Restricting interstate travel is going to be very difficult to both achieve and to survive federal court challenges.
Some toolkits are not available to some countries. The United States is unlikely to be able to effectively use the authoritarian measures other countries have used.
Pointing this out gets mass downvotes on HN which is a typical libertarian paradise, but when it comes to COVID, is all about authoritarian measures to get it done. I'd be fine with them too if they were at all practical in this country, but they aren't.
Such a barrier is only really essential when different states have different rules. If you could get all states to agree on a lock-down it would go a long way. You might be able to set up quarantine barriers as you exit the interstate? I don't know.
Personally, I think it is terms like "libertarian paradise" which lead to down-votes. Talk about the issues, not some made up catch all names like "libertarian"
Interstate commerce clause is going to be nearly impossible to subvert in courts, much less state autonomy, and non-cooperating governors (primarily Republican, I'm sure, but Gov. Polis likely wouldn't go for it either).
>> Talk about the issues, not some made up catch all names like "libertarian"
My comment was downvoted -3 before I even mentioned the word "libertarian." COVID has a way of bringing out the authoritarians in HN.
I am not either. I see the value in authoritarian measures, I really do. I also realize they won't work in the US because of both compliance and lack of legal purchase.
This is from a country that fought the British Empire, helped turn the tide in WW2, put a man on the moon, and made many scientific and technical achievements in the 20th century. But somehow, now, we can't seem to accomplish anything.
Australia, NZ and the other countries that have succeeded have a pro-social culture of collective effort.
The US, and increasingly Canada as well, do not - they have an “everyone for themselves” culture.
In the end if people are not going to follow the rules it won’t matter what you try to do - you will fail. In the US and Canada people only halfheartedly follow the rules when the situation is grim, the ERs are filled and freezer trucks parked in the hospital parking lot.
Florida has free tests. I tried two places (giant parks filled with hundreds of cars waiting), the cops told me 3+ hours wait each, I went to a private clinic and was done in 20 min. But yeah, they have free and fully subsidized tests.
Apparently the logistics of it is not that simple.
Kind of no point having the population get tested now in the US. Without contact tracing and quarantine a positive result arrives too late to help anyone.
First you need to lock down the entire state until the daily infected is only 1% of the testing capacity. 4 weeks of level 4 lock-down would do that. Then with contact-tracing you can start to get ahead of the virus by quarantining infected people (close contacts of the positive test) before they even transmit Covid further.
Also, I'm sorry that you are experiencing life in a state as infected as Florida. It sounds terrifying. I hope you get well soon and stay safe.
Why are the countries consistently being cited for doing good jobs in this thread seem to be island nations? Exclude AUS and NZ from the analysis and there are very few landlocked countries doing a good job without very authoritarian measures that are unlikely to be legal in the countries doing poorly.
The UK could have also succeeded but the government didn't have the will to even try early on. Now they are only willing to take half measures.
Also, we DID (NZ, AUZ) have a small advantage since we had less inbound infected for a few weeks early on due to distance. But then again, other nations (US, UK, ...) didn't even try to pursue an elimination strategy.
Also, I bet that when "the public demanded" it was a loud and public minority who wanted travel (and Covid-19) back.
Because these are western english speaking nations with a similar culture that have people posting on HN.