The way China controlled the virus is legally impossible in the United States. You simply can't confine someone to their home without due process.
New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Early in COVID, everyone suddenly became statisticians and had opinions on exponential growth, and while most of their proclamations were ill-informed, the truth remains that one infection can spiral out of control quickly. With a disease that exhibits nearly 40% asymptomatic rates and is aerosolized, there is no eradication. It will be with us in waves until we are immune via natural immunity or vaccinations.
If New Zealand opened their ports today to the same levels as the United States' ports, they would quickly see a spike.
> New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Firstly, New Zealand is not closed to human travel. It has mandatory quarantine for inbound travelers.
The US can do the same. It is in an even better situation to do so than New Zealand, because its economy is less dependant on tourism and imports.
It would be utterly pointless, of course, because nearly anywhere in the world has less COVID-per-capita than the US. A random traveler from Kentucky, or New Jersey is just as likely to be a COVID carrier as someone flying in from Paris. Keeping Parisians out isn't doing anything to stop spread, at this point. [1]
As for the legality of locking people in their own homes, the US is no stranger to blanket curfews during a state of emergency... Or for imprisoning symptomatic, or asymptomatic carriers of a disease.
[1] In a stroke of brilliance, travel from China to the US is still banned. Can anyone puzzle out how this policy is currently helping improve American health outcomes?
New Zealand has really 2 truly international airports (Auckland and Christchurch). The United States has over 50. In 2017, the United States saw over ~70,000,000, tourists through her ports of entry, while New Zealand saw 3,700,000 . These statistics are for tourist entries, so they don't even include repatriating citizens who traveled internationally. To institute the same quarantine rules in the United States would be untenable. Furthermore, inbound travelers to the United States _are_ supposed to quarantine for 14 days, there is just no enforcement mechanism.
And regarding the per capita infections, the most important figure is tests/1M population. We both know that testing doesn't cause infections, and tests only tell you what already exists. However, it is equally as true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So just as some nations may be reporting lower per capita infection rates, they also have a lower per capita test rate. You can't, with a straight face, say that India, which has performed 91,359 tests per 1m has fewer cases than the United States, which has performed 516,656 tests per 1M population. Put another way, 50% of Americans have been tested at one point in the past year, whereas only 9% of Indians have been tested.
Before just shitting on everything and having strongly held opinions strongly held, actually research the data and understand the tectonics underlying the world's response. It is not nearly as black and white as you and others seem to think it is.
The number of tests isn't the only relevant factor. Positivity is, as well. When positivity is near zero, either health authorities are incredibly, shockingly bad at picking who to test... Or Covid is not very prevalent in that community.
Per capita, the tourism numbers you cited are similar across the two countries. I am not sure what your point is.
> There is just no enforcement of quarantine
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This is why the virus is out of control in the United States. Even when rules are put in place to control it's spread, enforcement of those rules is incredibly lax.
New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.
Early in COVID, everyone suddenly became statisticians and had opinions on exponential growth, and while most of their proclamations were ill-informed, the truth remains that one infection can spiral out of control quickly. With a disease that exhibits nearly 40% asymptomatic rates and is aerosolized, there is no eradication. It will be with us in waves until we are immune via natural immunity or vaccinations.
If New Zealand opened their ports today to the same levels as the United States' ports, they would quickly see a spike.