Here in Germany, the government called Corona "a trick by the political right" to "achieve border closing". We only closed borders way after every country around us did. Because ideology is more important than human lives, apparently.
The "big switch" was 14to 15 of March. The MSN here ran a fake story about Trump wanting to buy some German pharma company (all large newspapers retracted the story around March 17), but it was enough to get people sufficiently distracted to completely change their previous policy.
It was pretty interesting to watch how it was orchestered.
Closing border refers to closing it for regular people.