Hacker News Reader

Thailand’s 50m people with 3,000km of mostly unpoliced border, they made it work. Vietnam made it work. Locking borders early and moving to quarantined entry apparently works, and when some knobs walk over the border with Covid, as has happened with both countries, you can unleash an almighty track-and-trace and isolated lockdowns because the health system isn’t already on its knees.

View on HN

They're not islands in a strict geographical sense, but there are a dozen or so countries which are de-facto islands for any practical purposes - accessible only through large bodies of water, with land borders mostly impassable or crossed so infrequently that they don't matter.

South Korea, North Korea, Finland, Vietnam, several central American countries and others. Even China fits the bill. Not sure how frequent traffic across Thai borders are, but my impression is that SE Asian countries are not very well integrated.

Track and trace works way better when you have 20 or so people infected than when you have 100,000. It's not even the health system, just the logistics of tracking everyone down. I kind of experienced both - the first in Koh Lanta and the second in London.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com