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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I think you have it backwards. I never said being an Island will save you, see the UK. Still the fact remains that there is no other Western country which is no Island that has zero Covid. If you accept this fact we can start discussing the underlying reasons.

Maybe it’s because they’re islands, and maybe you’re right and it’s because of the policy in place. I believe it’s the former, because it’s way more difficult to control influx of people in a connected economy like the EU for example.

It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.

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Yeah I agree there are no other western countries with zero covid except a couple island nations. There's also no other countries which have seriously tried to get covid to 0 except some island nations - which is interesting.

I'm convinced the most important difference is policy, but I wonder if there might be some psychological effect of living on an island all by yourself which makes you think "Well, can we just pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?". Those thoughts might be harder to think in Europe.

> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.

I think Canada could drive covid down to zero by closing the US border, then enforcing strict lockdowns. (And apparently they have closed the border to the US.) I think the US or the UK could do the same if they wanted at a national level. Well, at least in theory. I acknowledge it would be much more difficult to do the same in a small european nation. At least, it would be difficult to do it alone.

I agree with you. The most important difference is policy. And I also think the EU should have acted very differently. They should have been way quicker and more decisive.

However, bear in mind that Europe has become super interconnected in the last decade or so. There are millions crossing borders to work on the other side. Germany is a great example. Those counties close to the Czech border had way higher incidence levels, most probably due to the constant exchange with Czech Republic.

Yeah I get that, and I understand that that would make it difficult for individual nations to work alone. (Though not impossible - as other commenters have mentioned Australia successfully closed our internal borders.)

But you aren't in this alone. If Europe worked together, and your neighbors adopted similar policies it would have worked fine and covid would be under control by now.

The fact that you aren't on an island doesn't excuse the EU's bad covid policy decisions, at both the scale of individual countries and as a collective body.

> It’s basically like saying the state of New York could have been able to drive COVID down to zero while other states had it exploding.

This is exactly what Western Australia did. The Australian response was not nationally coordinated and each state has been doing their own thing. They have land borders between each other and yet the Victorian outbreak didn't spread to either NSW or SA because they implemented border checks by lining the roads with police and fining people who attempted to circumvent them, while WA implemented a hard border even earlier as soon as there was a non-zero number of cases.

The Australian states are geographically larger than many European countries, so I don't think it's that it's an island. The only effect nationally was hotel quarantine for arriving flights which is possible for landlocked countries as well.

I wasn’t aware of that. I think it was the right call. Still, compare the population density of WA to Central Europe. It’s probably 2 orders higher.

Then compare the Queensland-NSW border or the Victoria-NSW border, probably comparable with most European borders or at least within 1 order of magnitude. Both borders were closed (with exceptions) at various times to contain outbreaks to one state. If we loosen up the definition of country then these are Western countries that aren't island nations with zero covid.

It shouldn't also be noted that the borders don't have to be hermetically sealed. As long as cross border contamination is minimized other tools (contact tracing) can deal with it.

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