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Comment by tdfx | Hacker News Reader

> "We go hard and we go early" works.

"We go hard and we go early" works *in a small, remote island nation that is willing to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of the world.

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"small", "remote", and "island" aren't significant direct contributions here.

"seal" does -- whether any group is collectively capable of taking chain-of-exposure and its management seriously.

Make your island arbitrarily small and remote but have even a single person who's boating/flying or any kind of unmanaged travel outside the bubble regularly and you'll see infection overrun the island.

Pick an arbitrarily large city within miles of another on a shared continent with an unmanaged pandemic. Have it populated with people who are unified in careful contact management and they'll keep outbreaks scarce and small.

It's far easier to have a successful seal on a remote island than the Czech Republic or Alabama. Land borders are both more secure and more porous than you'd think.

What's Britains excuse? People swimming over from Calais to cough?

we never shut the airports (or the channel tunnel). If you arrived in the UK you were told to quarantine, but not made to.

Also our politicians are deeply incompetent and were the only ones in Europe (AFAIK) aiming for herd immunity right off the bat, until they eventually ran the numbers on death rates if the ICUs ran out of capacity and realised it was a terrible idea.

Right, so it's far more to do with institutions and policy than it is to do with how big an ocean you're in. NZ could have done the exact same thing - kept flights going, asked people politely to quarantine, etc.

Very true, but if you're a country with porous borders then it's going to be much harder to enforce. Border control is a prerequisite to enforcing transit quarantine, as well as having said rules in place, and border control is easier for an island.

Nobody really needs to go to New Zealand unless they’re from there. London is an international hub for multiple industries. It’s much harder to prevent people from traveling there.

If this pandemic has taught us anything it's that hardly any of us need to go anywhere.

As modest as the NZ economy is it's still a hub for a few industries, and people still wanted to come for business purposes.

Britain is so close to continental Europe that being an island is irrelevant. Also, it has a population of 66 million compared to NZ’s 5 on just as small an island.

1. New Zealand isn't "an island", there's two, one is slightly bigger and has less people.

2. Is your implication that the UK is so close to the mainland that the covid numbers are high due to people coming over in rafts? In that case the UK should have lower covid numbers because it has a much larger navy covering a the english channel, irish sea, and the north sea. Where as NZ has to cover the entire south pacific.

For #2, there are people crossing in boats https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-58100694 (and I don't think there's enough will to use the Navy to stop them).

1. Sure, it's a figure of speech. And the number is way greater than two, if we're going to be nitpicky.

2. My point is that there's way more people entering, leaving, and going from A to B for whatever reason. Not trying to judge people, just stating a fact here.

It is far easier to lock down an island chain of 5 million people than it is to lock down a city of 8.5 million people.

But China knows how to do it, and they have much more density than the USA. You just need to be very authoritarian; e.g. marching people under guard to quarantine hotels from airplanes.

Right, I will second this, our law enforcement shut down the Florida Keys at what we call he 18 mile stretch. No one that is not a resident was allowed in. for a good deal of time it worked and to be honest, I am thankful that they did, as at that moment in time, we did not know what we where looking at.

It’s also worked pretty well in China.

Incredibly well. But wonder how long they can keep doing it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-23/china-cru...

Where they forceably took citizens for quarantine?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/video-appears-show-people...

Yeah, that's not happening in the U.S. Not without starting a civil war.

"Later the policy became even more aggressive, with officials going door to door for health checks, and forcing anyone ill into isolation. A disabled boy reportedly died after he was left without food, water or help when his his father and brother were quarantined."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/chinas-coronav...

That's just the chinese administrative culture. It's obviously totally possible to do a strict lockdown without doing anything draconian.

Oh really? Is it possible to shut down the birthday parties and holiday gatherings my neighbors were having during the height of the winter peak without being draconian?

I'd argue that a 'strict lockdown' is, in itself, rather draconian. Almost by definition, it requires heavy policing of an individual's life and almost total surveillance of their movements.

If by 'strict lockdown' you mean 'Ask people to limit their movements and preferably just stay at home' then maybe that's not quite so draconian.

Being a remote island nation really doesn't make much difference in the era of Air travel. It has (had) very high immigration rates and a lot of tourists.

every single person traveling through an international airport is concentrated and processed in a way that people driving from alabama to florida are not. that makes an extraordinary difference.

Let's take an island nation with an island nation - the Isle of Mann.

58x less people than New Zealand. Only accessible by plane and boat.

37 deaths to NZs 26.

Also, a country with a GDP the size of the U.S. state of Oklahoma mind you (New Zealand's G.D.P 204,671, Oklahoma's G.D.P. 206,058 (in USD million, 2019, according to the IMF) [1]

[1] Comparison between U.S. states and sovereign states by GDP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_U.S._states...

What does GDP measured in Oklahomas have to do with anything?

It gives you a general idea, how significant or insignificant an economy is and also roughly how many other moving parts of the global economy it has complex gears in.

And thereby how many more fold damages can result from a catastrophic shutdown of the country, something a small geographically-on-the-periphery-of-the-world nation need not worry about, to the same degree.

You got it all in reverse. Large countries are much less affected by this as they are more self sufficient. Small countries have far more open economies and depend far more on import and export to work. They are too small to make everything themselves.

NZ isn't North Korea. It's not a hermit jurisdiction relying on its own internal economy. It relies a lot on trade with the rest of the world - it gets a lot of money from exports and relies a lot on imports (everything here is depressingly expensive for that reason).

Hell I'm even able to connect to communicate you using internet (the exact same kind you get in Oklahoma).

Except that's completely wrong. All the costs are borne by the citizens of NZ. Someone who can't go to work in NZ is just as affected as someone who can't go to work in the US. The difference is, and was, in the government's response in assisting those bearing those costs.

Wait until they actually open up. They are just delaying the inevitable. Then again there’s no reason to go indoors in crowds in NZ—not like they have an arts scene, or anything, really, besides the outdoors.

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