[threeseed]

The leading countries are Australia, NZ, South Korea etc:

https://covid19.healthdata.org

The estimate is that the US will be at 300,000 deaths by end of year. Whilst NZ will be at 22. US is 65x more populous so if they adopted similar policies would have been at 1430 deaths. And it could even be a million deaths by the time a vaccine is readily available.

And people like to bring up the island nonsense but fact is that the borders are largely closed with Canada and Mexico so the problem is purely to do with domestic policies and behaviours.

[oblio]

Germany has 9000 fatalities with 81 million people. If we extrapolate the US should have maybe 40000. And Germany has basically open borders with 10 countries directly and with about 30 through Schengen. And a much higher population density.

[me_me_me]

I think that is much better comparison than New Zealand.

Though there is one massive difference Germans hate having freedom and are not willing to die for it from Covid.

On a more serious note, this looks like a symptom of some fundamental crack in a fabric of US/UK etc societies where the baseline trust is almost non-existant (towards government, science, institutions).

[threeseed]

Does the US have open borders with 30 countries ? Or is it just 2 which are closed.

And the behaviour of people in societies are determined by (a) leadership and (b) policies of the various levels of government. That is where the US clearly has failed.

[raxxorrax]

Domestic policies probably don't really do that much aside from maybe closing public services like schools.

It has to do with how people behave, as we see in the article here, and NZ gets much less international traffic than the US and the island take has some merit. Iceland had 10 cases, Madagaskar around 150. You could argue that South Korea is an island too since there probably is little exchange on land routes. Australia wishes to be a continent, but... okay, maybe it really doesn't really fit here.

Infections aren't spread homogeneously, so I believe behavior of people is the main factor. Too bad, because you cannot just blame all this on someone.

I think the causes of infections get misattributed just like the performance of economies to immediate government policies.

[threeseed]

Australia and NZ restricted the numbers of incoming travellers and those that did arrive were forced to quarantine in hotels.

US has always been completely free to implement similar policies.

[lostlogin]

We are locked down here in Auckland, and had an admission to ICU today - I hope you are right that the death toll doesn’t rise. The new outbreak has been a bit of a shock out of complacency.

I wouldn’t choose to be in any other country at the moment, but this second lockdown has caused much more negativity than the first.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/424048/covid-19-what-hap...

[makomk]

There seems to be a certain amount of spin in news coverage of New Zealand too. Like, I was amazed to find out that New Zealand's prime minister had been repeatedly telling everyone that workers in quarantine hotels were being tested weekly for two months, when in reality most of them had never been tested at all, then blamed the staff for not getting tested. Then, when everyone was finally tested, a maintenance worker tested positive and it was traced back to someone quarantined there over a fortnight earlier that he'd never had any kind of contact with, implying there was some intermediate case that went undetected due to the lack of testing and that it's probably too late to identify them via testing now. This seems like something that would be a major political scandal if done by someone the press didn't want to portray as a success, but it just seems to have been quietly glossed over by the news coverage in places like the UK and even somewhat in their local news.