| Coming from a rural, conservative farm community in Australia — which seems quite culturally compatible with your own as you describe it — I beg to differ. The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach: Shut. TF. Borders. Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria. IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed. > The majority of the people here are conservative Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear. For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”. From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites. |