Also, Kauai did go on lockdown forcing every arrival to quarantine for 14 days regardless of testing status after they had a local COVID death. That policy was in early December, but I think they’re back on the general state plan now.
Conditions are still dire for the tourist industry even after things have opened back up a little bit. Just today I saw a headline in a local Kauai paper about small business owners organizing a meeting to agitate for loosening some more restrictions to help keep them afloat.
The US and Europe could have done this. England could have done this. They chose not to and exchanged a month of pain for a year of pain and 100s of thousands of deaths.
Germany is more locked-down internally (like Australia and NZ) than it is on its outside borders.
Is it a mess? Yes. Should it be done better? Yes.
But honestly, if Germany was an Island, it would be doing just as good as Australia and NZ. It locked down internal travel several times, had one of the best contact tracing when it was still possible, and generally just got outplayed by new strains swamping through land borders that neither NZ nor Australia even have.
No, absent martial law being imposed by the feds, this was never an option. The US federal government is not legally able to do the same things that unitary nations like South Korea and Australia can do on a whim. States delegated certain limited powers to the feds at inception, and reserve many, while affirmatively proscribing the federal government from doing specific things. States in the US are not simply local administrative bodies, they are essentially mini-nations that have out-sourced certain shared services. I’m speaking generally of course but that’s a better way to understand civics in the US vs some other (most?) countries. As a consequence of this system, states bear a lot of responsibility for their own policies. What do you think the tolerance would have been (or still is) for Joe Biden, much less Trump, declaring martial law? About zero, I’d suspect.
The right to travel within the US, like free speech, is near absolute. The due process hurdles to temporarily remove that right from an individual are very high; you can't do it with an edict nor de facto travel restrictions by abusing regulatory power (which has also been tested in the US Supreme Court).
Australia has significantly weaker individual freedoms than the US. This is one of those cases where those differences become apparent. Everyone asserting that the US should restrict travel like everyone else is ignoring that it is expressly illegal for the government to mandate such at thing in the US. No one in the US government is interested in dealing with the backlash such an attempt would elicit.
This appears to be wrong: https://www.justsecurity.org/69770/can-governors-close-their...
A thorough reading of that case law makes it plain that the proposals with respect to COVID would never pass judicial muster. In fact, there is considerable case law where attempts at such prohibitions were rejected outright but little curiosity in the above link as to the conditions and circumstances that caused the courts to throw them out.
The government knows that the courts won't allow them to cherrypick and selectively quote case law. It isn't an accident that every State in the US, across the entire political spectrum, came to the same policy conclusion regarding freedom of travel.
This guy from Yale thinks the same as the first one I linked:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-18/in-a-p...
It's not more draconian to restrict cross-border movement in Germany than it is in New Zealand, Fiji, or Mali.
Land borders are continuous with far more access points (spreading any testing or resources thin) and much more traffic due to lower cost and easier access.
But during outbreaks in both cities, there were border closures which included not just airports but also roads on the land border which is about 1000 km long. This protected one city from cases from the other.
Does Germany not have an army? It's one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
They can definitely show down the borders any time they want. See this from a year ago: https://www.gov.si/en/news/2020-03-20-germany-limits-the-num...
> and much more traffic due to lower cost and easier access
The traffic only exists while there is a high chance that people can cross the border. Close the borders for everything but cargo, and there will be much less traffic.
People will make up all sorts of excuses, but in fact anything is possible if you take the risk seriously enough.
I mean if COVID killed everyone it infected instantly and turned them into zombies, how soon would you see every way into Germany guarded?
But your post is simplifying much. Every way into German is literally all of it, except small parts in the North which are sea. Germany is all land border, essentially. Too much to control with any army. Ask Americans how that wall with Mexico is going. Like that.
Also, when Europeans speak of border posts, they mean some scanners on otherwise open highways. However, this doesn't mean that there's some sort of restriction outside of these border posts. Shutting them down doesn't mean anything is closed or whatever. You can cross into Germany literally anywhere. There are no borders, not in the way that you think.
When I was on the wrong side of the Dutch border soon before a local lockdown during a shooting, but was in a hurry, I just went through a village road.
Heck, there's even towns that practically cross borders. How are you going to control every street?
Right now, borders to several countries ARE closed. Does it stop most people coming to Germany? Nope.
There are also political considerations that are too complex to discuss here. Livelihoods across borders depend on coming to Germany, as well as a lot of pan-EU traffic. An overreach is likely shut down by courts, in the worst case by an EU court, which opens a new can of worms.
It's not as easy as you think.