I love how gullible you are

Projected number this year is 9.6

10% is on the border of relevant... except the average age of COVID death is 86

In that data set 9.6 is 100% an outlier, i.e. statistically significant.

That increase is after all of iur precautions. It would have been probably an order of magnitude higher if we hadn't dome distancing, masks, etc

86 year old dying 6 years early makes me care only slightly more than a little bit.

Woulda been a ton of 40 year old dads with heart problems dead if we hadn't done all of the isolation that we did. Still, we could have been like New Zealand or South Korea and actually had an economy over the summer, but instead we half assed it.

Average age of death: 86

Yeah, after we locked down and distanced dumbass.

Neither NA nor EU had a realistic shot at going for an eradication strategy the way New Zealand and Australia did. By the time governments realized that shit might really hit the fan in the third week of February, there were already thousands, probably tens of thousands of cases of community spread in the USA, Mexico and Western Europe. And without the advantage of being an island, maintaining a state of being free from covid community spread would have been impossibly hard anyway. Speaking of which, it should be noted that South Korea is an island too for practical purposes.

Maybe not eradication, but we could have controlled it far better and allowed more openings during summer when things were good. Places being islands is irrelevant, it's degree of international travel. EU probably was always gonna get fucked since they have such lax borders, so anything short of a full EU initiative would have failed. America is Canada and Mexico, both of which handled it better so if anything them coming over helped keep our cases down lol.