Nor was it politically an option in Aus, kinda. They’ve gone to great lengths to avoid using the words eradication and elimination, but Melbourne/Victoria got to zero cases late 2020 and released the lockdown and everyone had a great summer. Except for a couple of scares. The trick was to show people what life could be like with zero after it had been taken away for so long, and now everyone in this city gets it. All of the other states except apparently NSW learned the lesson from afar.

I think you’re right that the ability to pull off zero (as opposed to 10-20/day) rests squarely on the availability of extremely competent and fast testing and tracing. It’s either that or unacceptably draconian measures. Scaling up contact tracing capability To that level in Victoria took months because it’s really hard, so if you don’t see the slow movement on that front, it’s easy to see zero cases as a political impossibility. Maybe that’s what’s going on in NSW right now, alongside people getting used to the strictness necessary to make it work.

You obviously get how these things interact since you built the game mechanics simulating public trust in government in response to measures. It’s no different from the rest of them, it just only works at the small end of the log scale. And to get to the small end and make zero cases an option you have to play the rest of the game like a champ.

Endgame for Victoria is that our leader, who according to large swathes of Australian media is basically a dictator, is probably getting re-elected by a significant margin. There should be a button for answering 90 minutes of press questions live on TV every day for 4 months straight.