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And Japan. To be fair, Aus and NZ caught their epidemics very early, and are islands. Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of revers

And Japan. To be fair, Aus and NZ caught their epidemics very early, and are islands. Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of reverse contact tracing. The big problem in the "West" (i.e. Europe and US) is that lots of people don't engage with the contact tracing system, which makes the epidemic almost impossible to control. Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.

robocat 6y ago
> Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately. The countries mentioned have had community transmission, but they use contact tracing, testing, and shutdowns to stop it.
Teever 6y ago
I keep hearing the 'they are islands' thing and it has never made much sense to me. Can you explain why being an island is intrinsically better than not being an island? Does the size of the island matter? Does the location of the island matter? What if there are multiple islands?
- 867-5309 6y ago
  agreed. if anything, being an island would be worse because you have to condense a lot people into confined spaces just to cross the border
- corty 6y ago
  Islands don't really matter, but closed borders do. Europe has very different policies and rates of spread, but open borders mean that no country in the EU can eradicate Corona if the rest doesn't eradicate it at the same time. Case in point, Germany was at practically zero (around 1% positive tests with a 1% false positive rate) 6 weeks ago, currently it is lagging 3 weeks behind all its neighbors in the number of cases, rising exponentially.
- novok 6y ago
  Travel into islands is far harder than travel into cities in large land masses. You need to get a ticket on an airplane or a boat, which makes travel time a minimum of 1 hour usually and costs a whole bunch of money. This creates a natural barrier where people on islands don't interact with people on mainlands nearly as much. Look into covid numbers and you'll notice cities even in the same country that are on an island of some sort have significantly less covid numbers, such as Hawaii or Vancouver Island in Canada.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    How do you apply the “islands do better” logic to the UK or Hawaii? Hawaii might have done well by US standards, but it has performed badly compared to other islands. The UK has not done well.
    - josephg 6y ago
      Yes. Also Australia is an island, but Victoria (my state) peaked over 700 cases/day and other states during the same period managed to keep their case numbers controlled at the same time (~10 cases / day in NSW iirc). It wasn't magic. We closed the state borders, making each state basically its own island. Victoria imposed strict lockdowns to get the case numbers down and the rest of the country went about business as usual. I don't see why the same strategy wasn't used in Europe or the US. Its hard to control a virus when there's a constant stream of new cases coming over the border. I suppose its way too late for that now.
    - Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
      The UK is a remarkably un-island-like island in terms of the frequency and ease of travel between it and the mainland.
      - greenyoda 6y ago
        In particular, the UK and France are connected by a high-speed train tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel The travel times quoted by that article: "London to Paris taking 2 hours 15 minutes, to Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes." That's faster than some people's daily commutes into NYC.
freeone3000 6y ago
How is north america not an island?
- wolco2 6y ago
  It is a continent. A primary landmass on its tectonic plate. Plus it's connected to South America.
  - SaintGhurka 6y ago
    Not debating your point, but I want to point out that there is literally no overland travel between South America and North America because of the Darien Gap. If you want to get to the US from Bogota, you'll need to fly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap
    - tomhoward 6y ago
      I guess the key point is being an “island” is not enough when you have 300M+ people with huge amounts of intermingling, and the virus has already taken hold. Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        > the virus was not widespread when the severity threat became apparent. It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.
        tomhoward 6y ago
        Yep, I lived through it. I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on. And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.

robocat 6y ago

> Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately. The countries mentioned have had community transmission, but they use contact tracing, testing, and shutdowns to stop it.

Teever 6y ago

I keep hearing the 'they are islands' thing and it has never made much sense to me. Can you explain why being an island is intrinsically better than not being an island? Does the size of the island matter? Does the location of the island matter? What if there are multiple islands?

867-5309 6y ago
agreed. if anything, being an island would be worse because you have to condense a lot people into confined spaces just to cross the border
corty 6y ago
Islands don't really matter, but closed borders do. Europe has very different policies and rates of spread, but open borders mean that no country in the EU can eradicate Corona if the rest doesn't eradicate it at the same time. Case in point, Germany was at practically zero (around 1% positive tests with a 1% false positive rate) 6 weeks ago, currently it is lagging 3 weeks behind all its neighbors in the number of cases, rising exponentially.
novok 6y ago
Travel into islands is far harder than travel into cities in large land masses. You need to get a ticket on an airplane or a boat, which makes travel time a minimum of 1 hour usually and costs a whole bunch of money. This creates a natural barrier where people on islands don't interact with people on mainlands nearly as much. Look into covid numbers and you'll notice cities even in the same country that are on an island of some sort have significantly less covid numbers, such as Hawaii or Vancouver Island in Canada.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  How do you apply the “islands do better” logic to the UK or Hawaii? Hawaii might have done well by US standards, but it has performed badly compared to other islands. The UK has not done well.
  - josephg 6y ago
    Yes. Also Australia is an island, but Victoria (my state) peaked over 700 cases/day and other states during the same period managed to keep their case numbers controlled at the same time (~10 cases / day in NSW iirc). It wasn't magic. We closed the state borders, making each state basically its own island. Victoria imposed strict lockdowns to get the case numbers down and the rest of the country went about business as usual. I don't see why the same strategy wasn't used in Europe or the US. Its hard to control a virus when there's a constant stream of new cases coming over the border. I suppose its way too late for that now.
  - Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
    The UK is a remarkably un-island-like island in terms of the frequency and ease of travel between it and the mainland.
    - greenyoda 6y ago
      In particular, the UK and France are connected by a high-speed train tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel The travel times quoted by that article: "London to Paris taking 2 hours 15 minutes, to Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes." That's faster than some people's daily commutes into NYC.

freeone3000 6y ago

How is north america not an island?

wolco2 6y ago
It is a continent. A primary landmass on its tectonic plate. Plus it's connected to South America.
- SaintGhurka 6y ago
  Not debating your point, but I want to point out that there is literally no overland travel between South America and North America because of the Darien Gap. If you want to get to the US from Bogota, you'll need to fly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap
  - tomhoward 6y ago
    I guess the key point is being an “island” is not enough when you have 300M+ people with huge amounts of intermingling, and the virus has already taken hold. Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      > the virus was not widespread when the severity threat became apparent. It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.
      - tomhoward 6y ago
        Yep, I lived through it. I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on. And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.