Well, being an island a 'bit far away' certainly helped.
In Portugal I know folks that drove from London, Paris, Utrecht (Netherlands) and even Moscow to avoid the no fly laws so they could vacation here. I personally know 3 families that drove from Moscow to the Portuguese south during the lockdown period. (And I am sure based on the foreign plates I saw, various orders of magnitude more did so as well).
This is not to say it was all the foreigners, but it is much easier to control a pandemic if you can close all the borders (Madagascar anyone?) and have a smaller population. (This is also not to say NZers shouldn't be praised, but just a land border with 2-3 countries would probably see a lot of these efforts go to waste)
That has nothing to do with islands or not. Just lack of political will to enforce.
In Vietnam, when there was a new outbreak in Da Nang, the whole city was isolated from the rest of the country. Flights grounded. Roads closed, with checkpoints. Trains stopped. This lasted for several weeks until it was clear that situation was under control.
Some Canadian provinces had setup measures to prevent unnecessary travel.
There are 5 mains highways that connect Portugal and Spain. Then are around 15 (can't find the details, from memory) that are normal roads where you can also do the crossing. Then you have several smaller roads you can also do the crossing. If you are really really into it, then you can also cross it by walking in several other places.
Having 24/7 border patrol between two land connected countries setup and agreed over 20+ crossing points isn't something easy to do, specially during a pandemic where those agents are also needed elsewhere (and there were border patrols along the mains roads, but not close to all).
Compare to only entering by airplane where you can a) prevent planes from landing by just sending an email (exaggerating) and b) anyone that lands goes through a funnel where you can easily quarantine them.
And you can't compare a city, with 1,285 km2 with a country of 92,212 km2 (and other countries even more) and talk about border controls. Portugal also did the same to a city with some success but still there were flaws in the patrolling.
No one said it would be easy. But for a country to deploy even a few hundred people shouldn’t be a challenge.
If a country can’t close a road, how would it hold up during an attack or war?
This should be a well trained, standard procedure.
Canada is in between mainland US and Alaska. US citizens were allowed to drive thru without diversion. Some didn’t follow the rules and made unnecessary detours. They were fined $600,000 for that. You just need a couple of these cases to make the news to deter people from skirting the laws.
Da Nang also had small road leaks at first. Then those who were diverting via those roads were caught and punished. Roads were closed.
Same in Australia. Travel between states is restricted based on how affected each area is. It didn't start perfectly for border communities, but it was mostly fixed in a couple of weeks.
