I live in the Azores on an island with less than 15k people which was mostly closed last year. There are only two ways to enter the island: the port and the airport there isn't a lot of movement and everyone coming in is tested twice. On top of that people here are terrified of the virus and take it very seriously (masks, distancing, etc) and can even be hostile to newcomers.
Still, cases keep popping up even without systematic testing. There are no deaths or even ICU cases but the virus keeps finding its way in. I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable.
Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China.
And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airborne Rabies strain (100% mortality) are going to require a rapid, whole-of-society response to shut it down. If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked.
Islands and countries such as Australia are having a completely different experience, as they can track incoming cases and with good quarantine practices genuinely create a safe bubble for all residents. Watch what happens with New Zealand, Iceland and other small islands like yours and the Canaries etc - you'll be out of lockdown while everyone agrees to be very strict on what enters the country, something continental countries can't do.
If you enter Mauritius you have to get four tests in total over several weeks. Islands are taking advantage of their isolation to get this pandemic under control.
Madeira has been very successful during all of 2020 with not letting it escalate.
You make it sound like the spread of covid could have been avoided. Only some island nations managed to prevent the spread and even then they are merely delaying the inevitable.
Fair enough, I should have said “be a small island”. Obviously everything changes when you’re dealing with a population two orders of magnitude that of New Zealand: it’s harder to secure ports, harder to control contagion internally, etc. Moreover, the US never even attempted to harden its ports until the virus was already spreading out of control.
That said, the US has a lot of people crossing its land borders—even if it completely hardened its ports, outlawed border crossings, and was much better at reducing internal contagion, it would still have to deal with thousands of people who cross illegally and who aren’t going to quarantine for two weeks or abide by any kind of contact tracing programs.
We should have slammed the international borders shut at the first sign of it, and placed any region with outbreaks into the strictest lockdown we could humanely devise. Lesson learned for next time. Too late for that for most of the world. Now we have to learn to live with it somehow.
But it worked for New Zealand. They're in a very odd position now. Domestically as long as they can keep it out, they could go completely back to normal. Except for international travel. (It's been mostly normal most of the time aside from that, from what I understand.)
Unlikely imo. False reliance on testing has created more issues than it helped. Look at Taiwan (another small island nation). They don't bother testing. If you are sick, it's assumed you have COVID and you quarantine for two weeks. Much smarter and safer imo.
I disagree, and think small island nations do have much better chances. Otherwise we'd probably have great success stories in places like Andorra, Armenia, and Vatican City. I'm sure island countries to be more self reliant, with fewer major transport hubs that can be locked down.
Alternatively, this can be read as: even an isolated island nation with low population, almost no migration into the country, and high compliance rates was unable to stop COVID via lockdowns (and no vaccines).
NZ peaked at 150 cases/day, the UK didn’t start its first lockdown till 5000 cases/day. And that’s 5000 tested cases.
It was too late (even though Italy was bad and a good canary, UK politicians did nothing). Even if the country remains in permanent lockdown the virus will still spread now for months/years.
Well, being an island a 'bit far away' certainly helped.
In Portugal I know folks that drove from London, Paris, Utrecht (Netherlands) and even Moscow to avoid the no fly laws so they could vacation here. I personally know 3 families that drove from Moscow to the Portuguese south during the lockdown period. (And I am sure based on the foreign plates I saw, various orders of magnitude more did so as well).
This is not to say it was all the foreigners, but it is much easier to control a pandemic if you can close all the borders (Madagascar anyone?) and have a smaller population. (This is also not to say NZers shouldn't be praised, but just a land border with 2-3 countries would probably see a lot of these efforts go to waste)
The UK isn't doing so great, despite being an island. Neither is the US, which is in many ways an island: it has only two neighbors and the borders are largely shut. We're not getting our COVID from Mexico or Canada.
Being an island will help if you're following the rules (especially compared to countries with unruly neighbors). But not if you're just going to keep reinfecting each other.
The first time round wasn't the main thing that NZ basically shut itself off from the world? I was generally supportive of the sort of measures much of the world implemented restrict the spread of covid (widespread testing, masks, vaccinations, encouraging WFH, etc) however to me both NZ and China's approaches didn't seem feasible for most of the world.
So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.
If there is much socialising and lack of testing and tracing, it may be alarming due to new cases. In places without contagion, there needs to be preparedness, or risk another round. Italy/France/Spain took their time until lockdown and rest of Europe learned from that. This needs planning and leadership, then opening may be OK.
NZ AZ and Taiwan have kept the virus out very well with border controls.
Everyone realizes that there's no way to keep it out without ultra-strict controls with most nations do not have, but, they can delay the virus - hopefully until after the holidays, they can smooth out how quickly it erupts, and they can buy time to further understand it's impact.
> On the other end of the spectrum there are countries such as Poland with no initial first wave back in March. But it seems you can only go for so long before the virus turns up.
Incidentally, the Marshall Islands just had their first case (and from my arcgis dashboard it looks like a second one). If one of the world's most remote islands with a population of under 60,000 can get it within a year, there's little hope to keep it out of anywhere.
How long until tribes like the Sentinelese [1] get coronavirus? (Thankfully many of these tribes are very hostile and it's illegal to even attempt to make contact precisely because of previous transmission during contact)
Closing the borders is not the problem, at least initially.
Getting cross-contamination level between households down to effectively zero, and keeping it there long enough for 2 infection cycles is the hard part.
NZ did it.
Australia managed it eventually.
A number of Asian countries have done well too. Possibly off the back of experience dealing with the prior SARS/MERS scares.
Some of the African countries have done pretty well, possibly because of experience dealing with Ebola.
New Zealand gets plenty of goods via air-freight, along with a continuous stream of returning ex-pats and foreign workers.
and ships aren't so slow that the crews (and goods) are automatically safe to interact with when they get here.
I'd wait to draw any serious conclusions until after the pandemic is "over" in both countries you're comparing. It sure seems like this virus doesn't need much of a foothold to take off, and just because an island has been able to deny that so far doesn't mean they'll be able to deny the virus until they are fully vaccinated and out of the woods.
IMO the key issue that caused it to spread so much in the US is there weren't restrictions on mobility. If borders were closed between states, and stricter lockdowns were put in place in hot spots, it could have been controlled.
A lot of smaller European countries are starting to get to the same point as NZ because that's exactly what they did - they restricted travel between borders and required any citizens returning home to self-quarantine. In a lot of places people regularly travel across borders for work, shopping, leisure etc, so Europe as a whole can be compared to the US in this matter. In my country they did this before even the first death, and two months later life is now starting to return to normal.
Along the same lines, it's not surprising that larger countries like Italy, Spain, France and the UK have a worse outbreak, as they put few restrictions on travel domestically and what they did was too late.
New Zealand, for sure, has had probably the most effective response (helped by geography, for sure) among western nations.
That said: having it controlled now doesn't mean that it will stay controlled forever. As we're seeing right now in Spain, France and the US plains states, even very low steady state infection rates can still flare up. Then you spend a week watching people die, locking down, and watch rates go back down slowly. And then... realistically it probably happens a third time. Or a fourth.
Everyone needs to be taking this seriously. NZ isn't immune to the next outbreak, nor Sweden. But no: in areas with known-low and steady infection rates, a full lockdown isn't necessarily required.
Still: stay outside, stay masked, stay apart. Break those rules as little as possible.
Still, cases keep popping up even without systematic testing. There are no deaths or even ICU cases but the virus keeps finding its way in. I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable.
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