The goal is to maintain measures until a vaccine arrives, eliminating the threat for any said country.
> I argued that that would be extremely difficult to pull off and then maintain by physically isolating that country from the rest of the world.
You don't need the country to be isolated from the rest of the world. If the effective reproduction (R) of your country's population is below 1 it won't spread there, even if the rest of the world is letting it run wild and free.
And it's likely we can get R below 1 for any given population with just strict mask usage and curtailing some higher risk social activities. That's my argument. We don't need to do messy lockdowns, ruin our social lives, etc. If everyone just got on board with those simple measures instead of being selfish.
