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Comment by _lbaq | Hacker News Reader

Helps to have no land borders, not saying Australia didn’t do a great job curbing it ..

Thailand has done an even better job, with just under 4,200 infections total since January. It has land borders with four other countries, the most porous of which is Myanmar. Very recently there have been some cases of infected people crossing over illegally from the latter; health authorities have been doing very thorough contact tracing so it remains to be seen if this will escalate. But last week was the first time in months there was more than a handful of cases nationwide, excluding foreign travelers in quarantine.

Why has it worked so well here? I don't know the full answer, but by and large people have been very responsible. The last time I was at an airport, back in early February, every single person was wearing a mask, and in lots of public places the majority of people continue to do so. Mask wearing has not been politicised here. Also every shopping mall and most restaurants/public places scan you for temperature on entry and have a book where you can (optionally) write down your name or register with an app to be notified if it is later discovered an infected person has been there the same day you were.

Does it really? Has it been found that a significant source of infections was illegal immigration? Or that without it there would not have already been internal spreading?

Doesn't matter. If you don't have covid, and nobody comes in, you won't get covid.

But that's not feasible in most countries.

Austrailia and NZ don't rely on a just-in-time cross border economy like the US and Europe. Goods arrive after being on boats which have been off shore for days or weeks.

Compare with the US-Canada "border closure", where thousands of trucks, and their drivers, have crossed each way every day all year.

Canada-US could do what they already do with trains: crew change at the border.

Or even trailer drop-off and pick-up for no-chance-of-personal-contact changes.

They just choose not to.

That's still orders of magnitude more goods crossing a border without a quarentine period than you get from air freight to Aus/NZ

I don’t think the issue is quarantining/isolation of goods, but the people transporting it.

Canadian cross-border truckers arriving back from ??? USA are largely exempt from quarantine requirements upon return.

That's what is happening at this moment in Thailand. There were no local transmissions for many months. Borders are closed and anyone coming into the country has to go directly to 14 day quarantine and test clean before they get out. But then some Thais went to Myanmar and snuck back into Chiang Mai in northern Thailand illegally. They were infected and have now spread the infection locally in Thailand to at least a few people. Some cases took flights to Bangkok. There is a frantic effort to track and trace everyone who might have been exposed.

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