Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of reverse contact tracing.
The big problem in the "West" (i.e. Europe and US) is that lots of people don't engage with the contact tracing system, which makes the epidemic almost impossible to control.
Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.
Does the size of the island matter? Does the location of the island matter? What if there are multiple islands?
Look into covid numbers and you'll notice cities even in the same country that are on an island of some sort have significantly less covid numbers, such as Hawaii or Vancouver Island in Canada.
I don't see why the same strategy wasn't used in Europe or the US. Its hard to control a virus when there's a constant stream of new cases coming over the border. I suppose its way too late for that now.
The travel times quoted by that article: "London to Paris taking 2 hours 15 minutes, to Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes."
That's faster than some people's daily commutes into NYC.
The countries mentioned have had community transmission, but they use contact tracing, testing, and shutdowns to stop it.
A primary landmass on its tectonic plate.
Plus it's connected to South America.
Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.
It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.
I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on.
And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.
if you say Mexico is in your definition of North America then it should include all of central america, almost all these countries have a lot of land-based trade.
In Canada we have not had any cases related to truckers, but there's a lot of them who have to do the cross-border route, as well as people who commute daily across the border. heck in Canada and the US there are a few spots where crossing the border is necessity -- the only school is in the other country, nearest hospital, the local library, a popular golf course, etc.
or places like point roberts, extremely small but extremely isolated, or Hyder, Alaska.