Island nations in the southern hemisphere...they may be benefiting from a bunch of factors that don't really apply elsewhere. Their lockdowns might be the whole story but they might not; nobody knows.
I wouldn't assume that lockdowns do nothing, but then it also depends on the exact specifics of the lockdown. In California a few days ago some school - I think UC Berkeley - put a ban on its dorm students doing solo outdoor exercise, for example. That's almost guaranteed to make the problem worse, not better: more time in a building with, basically, shared ventilation systems, and less time outside where as far as we know, covid doesn't really transmit well at all. There's no question that lockdown policy increases the likelihood of transmission according to everything we know about this virus, but it's the policy.
So it's not just a matter of "lockdown swift and aggressively" - there's ways to lock down that make things better, and ways that make things worse.
We don't really know the details of why NZ and Australia have been successful, but they don't have transport trucks crossing the border into the USA and back every single day by the thousand, that's for sure. We do. What's the impact of that? What demographic is most affected? Where would those results show up? But what would we do without those trucks?
This is exactly why I'm not a huge fan of strict lockdowns. We don't know exactly how well they work because, among other issues, we don't know what the role of mandatory exceptions is playing. But what's quite easy is: mask up in confined or shared spaces, spend time outside, eat well, stay healthy. For the vast, vast majority of us, that's going to cover it pretty well.
www.worldometers.info
globalnews.ca
