The game should model this because it is the only strategy that has been shown to be actually effective, and might make people realise how badly governments handled this.
Not at all. A zero-covid strategy doesn't mean “Covid doesn't happen, nothing to do here”. It means locking down entire cities as soon as a few case of unknown origin are diagnosed, and doing so every time the situation occurs: it's not a one time medicine, you must be ready to to enact local lockdowns many times.
Australia, Vietnam, China, South Korea, etc. saved hundred thousands of lives by taking extreme measures super early on. Locking down 7 million people when 9 cases have been found is an extremely tough political decision to make, but it has been immensely successful (both from the health and economy point of view). The western world has been completely oblivious to this strategy since the beginning of the pandemic, and not allowing this kind of strategy in a game is just going to reinforce this idea that there is no alternative to the deadly “flatten the curve” strategy.
I was an advocate for full lockdown in the US two weeks before the government even acknowledged the problem. I was already in quarantine a week before they did, and we isolated on a farm for a year until we got both shots. But the reality is we're in a country where we can't even convince people to get the vaccine now, much less skip spring break.
I don't think it's sending a message that total lockdown isn't an option. In fact, it's an option in the game. Lockdown in EU countries was much more severe than it was in the US. And Czechia is a landlocked nation at the heart of Europe, so closing borders is a wild and drastic thing in that context... much more so than in NZ, for example, which has rightly been called the "bolt-hole of billionaires" for the apocalypse.
I agree that we could have stopped this in its tracks if we had locked down Seattle and New York completely at the end of 2/2020. But I suspect it would have ended up in rural Missouri eventually anyway. And once it's endemic and the only option is to flatten the curve, there's no point in a simulation of a scenario that had no basis in reality, and there's still a lot of value in teaching people what flattening the curve means: preemptively locking down and closing before things get astronomically out of hand.
Not American so I can't judge about there, but in Europe, most countries closed restaurants and theaters for almost 6 months, schools for more than 3 months, people where submitted to curfews and harsh circulation restrictions (cannot go farther than 10km from your house without a justification and papers to prove so − in France for almost 4 month in total). and borders where closed for months (my brother in the UK couldn't practically come to France fro the 5 first months of this year). And people where sent to jail for not respecting those restrictions. It's not like the western world acted like “freedom-loving countries”, overall there were much more, and much longer freedom limitations in France, Italy and other European countries than there were in China.
The island vs continental countries is also a fallacy, there's been as many death in Cyprus and Malta (1.5M inhabitant together) than in NZ, Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan grouped (more than 130M people living there). What's their excuse?
Hermetically closing borders would be very hard for Czech Republic (with strong economic and personal ties to the neighboring countries). There was political will to go for zero covid strategy anyways.
If I was allowed to go for some dream solution it would be coordinated strategy on EU (or Schengen) level.