This is a genuinely good comment that touches on a lot of issues I could write whole essays on, but I've tried to keep each point relatively brief here. I will note that most of these points are in the context of March 2020. With vaccinations edging closer to herd immunity and case counts in most of the world at absolutely uncontrollable levels, none of this advice is really helpful without a time machine. Maybe next pandemic we'll get it right?
> It's sort of fascinating that Australians believe that we didn't take measures to stop community spread in the U.S similar to what was done in their home country. [...] I'm curious which restrictions you believe were implemented in Australia, aimed at reducing community spread, that were not in the U.S.? What did you do that "eradicated" the virus that we were unable or unwilling to do? This is an honest question.
Last year my state enacted a lockdown after the discovery of 17 cases over a period of two days. During that lockdown you were not allowed to leave your house unless you were an essential worker. The only exception to this was one person per household being allowed to go directly to the nearest grocery store and directly back once per day.
This lockdown was meant to last for a week, it ended up only lasting for three days as that was all that was necessary to eradicate the virus.
I'm unaware of any state or even city in the United States that has done anything even remotely comparable to that at any case count, let alone having done it at the onset of an outbreak. Yes, not even allowing exercise is extreme, but it then gave us six months of having absolutely no cases or restrictions whatsoever. Very much worth it as far as I'm concerned.
I will also note that compliance seems much better in Australia (or at least, my corner of it). I don't think I've seen a single person in a public building without a mask since our mask mandates were first introduced. Based on what I've heard from my American friends, this is extraordinarily far from the case in even the most pandemic-conscious communities in the States.
> Claiming that you only shut your borders to "countries that could not control spread" is incorrect, no? Your international border was completely shut to non-citizens.
Australia's border had been open to New Zealand (and vice versa) for significant chunks of the last year. It no longer is due to ongoing outbreaks in Sydney and Auckland, but generally speaking free travel between countries that had eradicated COVID-19 did exist.
> Even if we had been able to eradicate the virus in the lower 48 states, it would have been instantly reintroduced into the country.
Yep, reintroduction is a major issue and every time it happens carries a major risk (just look at Sydney right now). However, exponential growth having to start from the ground floor buys you so much time to get vaccinations up to an acceptable level. And while expecting everywhere to successfully eradicate the virus is optimistic at best, if the US actually set a good example rather than being an absolute dumpster fire in its pandemic response, I believe that the rest of the world would have followed suit and made things at least slightly manageable. I really can't understate how much of the anti-lockdown and "COVID is a hoax" conspiracy sentiment in Australia is very clearly directly copied from the talking points of the previous US President. There's thankfully not much of it, but almost all of it comes from people who can't even name the leader of the main left-wing party in Australia but spend 3 hours a day posting about Joe Biden on Facebook.
> I've never been to Adelaide but judging by the map, and your response, it's a more remote area of the country.
I wouldn't really describe it like that, but I suppose it depends on your definition of "remote". It's definitely heavily urban, and travel between different major cities is still high despite the large distances involved.
>Those that lived in mega-cities like Sydney had much more community spread, before the seriousness of the issue was known, due to their global interconnectedness.
This is correct, but given that all of Australia - Sydney included - successfully eradicated the virus the first go around, it doesn't seem to have been a major sticking point.
> Once the virus was widespread within the community, it was not possible to stop it.
This is possibly true in some environments now with the Delta strain (although we may never know for sure - increased vaccination rates mean that eradication is no longer the only strategy), but it certainly wasn't a year ago. In mid-2020 Melbourne (a city of over 5 million people) had uncontrolled community spread during its second wave, with up to 700 cases a day and about 20,000 cases through the course of that outbreak. They managed to completely eradicate the virus. It took a long time because of how slowly they reacted to the outbreak (initially attempting postcode restrictions instead of a full-city lockdown, something that turned out to be woefully ineffective), but they did get down to zero again.
Now perhaps you're using a definition of "widespread" that is far greater than was the case for Melbourne. That would be reasonable - even that major outbreak pales in comparison to almost anything overseas - but I would make the argument that almost every city in the world knew that COVID was a serious problem well before they got to that point.
> But if that's the case, can't you understand how that was never an option for many places?
If China managed to eradicate the virus in Wuhan, then it should have been possible for any developed country. Sure, Western nations can't exactly go to the same extremes that China did (thankfully), but we also had the advantage of 2 months to prepare before things got really bad.