[Goose]

Being an island is not a protection from COVID in the days of airplanes.  The United States did not get COVID-19 because of people poring over the border from Mexico or Canada; we got it from people with the disease flying arriving at airports.  And Taiwan, New Zealand, Japan, etc. all had planes bringing people with COVID-19 in.  The pandemic was out of control because we mismanaged it; the pandemic was kept under control at other countries because they managed it better.



BC

Not quite true, BC, IMHO. The epidemic never got out of control in Taiwan and New Zealand. Not very many brought COVID-19 in. Taiwan acted quickly and closed down it's airports and isolated the few cases it did have. Lots easier to do when you only have one main airport. It then put in place strict quarantines on entering people. For a long time they had a grand total of 18 cases. Similarly, New Zealand had very few cases when it shut down travel into the country, 4 as I recall.. Obviously it has few ports of entry (airports if you will, but seaports are also an issue), so it can do that easily. We didn't do that. We didn't have a plan to do that.  So, in that sense they managed the situation much better. They were better prepared and had an easier task. How many international ports of entry (airports and seaports if you will) exist in the USA? Lots, and we had neither the plan nor the will to shut them down very early on.

It may be true that the big outbreak in NY was unavoidable because there were already too many positive people in the country by the time we had the cases in Washington state. However, I have also heard it said that there was a big "inoculation" caused by people returning from Europe in response to the China travel restrictions and that this drove the epidemic there. Be that as it may, the US certainly had an out of control situation that these other nations did not experience. We then didn't manage it well, but it is easier to manage a controlled outbreak than one in the "community spread" status, which we never actually exited.

[Goose]

Being an island is not a protection from COVID in the days of airplanes.  The United States did not get COVID-19 because of people poring over the border from Mexico or Canada; we got it from people with the disease flying arriving at airports.  And Taiwan, New Zealand, Japan, etc. all had planes bringing people with COVID-19 in.  The pandemic was out of control because we mismanaged it; the pandemic was kept under control at other countries because they managed it better.



BC

Not quite true, BC, IMHO. The epidemic never got out of control in Taiwan and New Zealand. Not very many brought COVID-19 in. Taiwan acted quickly and closed down it's airports and isolated the few cases it did have. Lots easier to do when you only have one main airport. It then put in place strict quarantines on entering people. For a long time they had a grand total of 18 cases. Similarly, New Zealand had very few cases when it shut down travel into the country, 4 as I recall.. Obviously it has few ports of entry (airports if you will, but seaports are also an issue), so it can do that easily. We didn't do that. We didn't have a plan to do that.  So, in that sense they managed the situation much better. They were better prepared and had an easier task. How many international ports of entry (airports and seaports if you will) exist in the USA? Lots, and we had neither the plan nor the will to shut them down very early on.

It may be true that the big outbreak in NY was unavoidable because there were already too many positive people in the country by the time we had the cases in Washington state. However, I have also heard it said that there was a big "inoculation" caused by people returning from Europe in response to the China travel restrictions and that this drove the epidemic there. Be that as it may, the US certainly had an out of control situation that these other nations did not experience. We then didn't manage it well, but it is easier to manage a controlled outbreak than one in the "community spread" status, which we never actually exited.