Quote (Thor123422 @ 6 Jan 2021 04:11)
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.
Mexico is a disaster zone when it comes to covid, huge excess mortality and such. Dont get fooled by their relatively low case numbers, they're testing far less.
Many European countries got over the first wave in pretty good shape, and had a pretty good summer. With the exception of Norway and Greece, we all failed horribly this winter.
Places being an island makes a huge difference since it means that you can easily control every entry. With a land border thousands of kilometers long, you would have positive cases slipping through all the time, and then need to lock down entire regions to stop the infection chains triggered by them. It would severely diminish the advantages of an eradication strategy over the flatten-the-curve strategy.