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Great, thanks for the info. mRNA tech really is amazing!! I agree. Everywhere should've pursued elimination strategy like Australia and New Zealand, and even a

Great, thanks for the info. mRNA tech really is amazing!! I agree. Everywhere should've pursued elimination strategy like Australia and New Zealand, and even at this late stage would be the best option.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Everywhere should've pursued elimination strategy like Australia and New Zealand Australia and New Zealand were very unusual in having that possibility, not everyone could have followed such a strategy. The EU had to move thousands and thousands of migrant agricultural workers from Eastern Europe to Western Europe for the harvests, otherwise there would have been scarcities of common foodstuffs. Also goods move through Europe largely through freight trucks that mean drivers moving about, not container shipping like the two island nations you mention.
- graeme 6y ago
  I’m in Atlantic Canada, where we had eliminated it locally. We moved in agricultural workers, it was fine. We just had an isolation requirement and testing. We have freight trucks from the US too! A lot of obstacles are not, in fact, insurmountable. The actual issue is that most places weren’t aiming at elimination.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > We moved in agricultural workers, it was fine. We just had an isolation requirement and testing. As you might remember, there was a shortage of tests the first time that the EU needed to move its agricultural workers en masse (which happened already in the spring – harvests in Spain are more or less continuous, unlike Atlantic Canada where it is much more restricted seasonally). Also, many of those agricultural laborers live in precarious working conditions that the state has little insight into, and arranging any kind of isolation on short notice was not possible. The EU was not aiming at total elimination because the virus had already spread throughout the bloc practically before the authorities were even aware of it and again, these are not island nations.
    - graeme 6y ago
      Sure but you had until the end of August to end it. Spring was the early days. And it would have been conceivable to try to eliminate it locally in sectors other than agriculture. Deal with the easy buts first and then the hard bits after. Often the hard bits become easier in so doing. You could have kept internal border controls except for essential work. We did that in Atlantic Canada. Australian states did that. We’re just as integrated as the EU is! We never had a border at any point in our history. So we set one up. There are non islands that more or less eliminated it. China, vietnam for example. Harder in the EU? More complicated? Absolutely. But the policy the EU pursued was an abject failure, so merely saying “there would have been difficulties” doesn’t show that elimination would have been worse. The places that reduced covid better generally saw better economic results too.
      - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        > You could have kept internal border controls except for essential work. Lack of internal borders in the EU is one of the most important features of the bloc, both in terms of maintaining close integration that could prevent more intra-European wars and in terms of mere everyday convenience. I would gladly sacrifice the demographic most at risk of COVID (about half of all deaths in the EU so far have been in care homes) in order to avoid internal borders. Also, China has been able to eliminate COVID (and even that is subject to doubt) only through civil-rights violations that the West would not tolerate. Pointing to China and saying "They did it, so the EU could too" misses the point. Vietnam was able to avoid a surge in COVID cases only because they hadn’t yet got the huge number of cases that the EU had first without even being aware of it; of course if somewhere else is already suffering, and you aren’t, you can close the borders and avoid the problems from the start.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> Everywhere should've pursued elimination strategy like Australia and New Zealand Australia and New Zealand were very unusual in having that possibility, not everyone could have followed such a strategy. The EU had to move thousands and thousands of migrant agricultural workers from Eastern Europe to Western Europe for the harvests, otherwise there would have been scarcities of common foodstuffs. Also goods move through Europe largely through freight trucks that mean drivers moving about, not container shipping like the two island nations you mention.

graeme 6y ago
I’m in Atlantic Canada, where we had eliminated it locally. We moved in agricultural workers, it was fine. We just had an isolation requirement and testing. We have freight trucks from the US too! A lot of obstacles are not, in fact, insurmountable. The actual issue is that most places weren’t aiming at elimination.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > We moved in agricultural workers, it was fine. We just had an isolation requirement and testing. As you might remember, there was a shortage of tests the first time that the EU needed to move its agricultural workers en masse (which happened already in the spring – harvests in Spain are more or less continuous, unlike Atlantic Canada where it is much more restricted seasonally). Also, many of those agricultural laborers live in precarious working conditions that the state has little insight into, and arranging any kind of isolation on short notice was not possible. The EU was not aiming at total elimination because the virus had already spread throughout the bloc practically before the authorities were even aware of it and again, these are not island nations.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Sure but you had until the end of August to end it. Spring was the early days. And it would have been conceivable to try to eliminate it locally in sectors other than agriculture. Deal with the easy buts first and then the hard bits after. Often the hard bits become easier in so doing. You could have kept internal border controls except for essential work. We did that in Atlantic Canada. Australian states did that. We’re just as integrated as the EU is! We never had a border at any point in our history. So we set one up. There are non islands that more or less eliminated it. China, vietnam for example. Harder in the EU? More complicated? Absolutely. But the policy the EU pursued was an abject failure, so merely saying “there would have been difficulties” doesn’t show that elimination would have been worse. The places that reduced covid better generally saw better economic results too.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      > You could have kept internal border controls except for essential work. Lack of internal borders in the EU is one of the most important features of the bloc, both in terms of maintaining close integration that could prevent more intra-European wars and in terms of mere everyday convenience. I would gladly sacrifice the demographic most at risk of COVID (about half of all deaths in the EU so far have been in care homes) in order to avoid internal borders. Also, China has been able to eliminate COVID (and even that is subject to doubt) only through civil-rights violations that the West would not tolerate. Pointing to China and saying "They did it, so the EU could too" misses the point. Vietnam was able to avoid a surge in COVID cases only because they hadn’t yet got the huge number of cases that the EU had first without even being aware of it; of course if somewhere else is already suffering, and you aren’t, you can close the borders and avoid the problems from the start.