I live in Taiwan.. I’m grateful to be living here during Covid.

Taiwanese people aren’t obedient. You should see how they drive.

They wear masks without flaking out about it as slavery or being against their will or whatever nonsense you guys are on about back home in the west.

Taiwanese people are couch potatoes and extremely reserved. They don’t really want to meet new people or hang out with strangers.

Also the government here didn’t play games in the early weeks. No wait and see business as usual lazy bullshit like in the US. They check tour temperature everywhere, mall entrances, restaurants, government buildings.

The us most certainly should copy Taiwan.

All of the things you've noted are true, but the flip side is that that there seems to be a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" (or worse, flat out pandemic denialism) mentality that takes hold instead of thinking about whether it would be possible to push for some of the most obvious policies that have been shown to be the most effective (eg, enforcing testing and quarantine for all travelers, improved science communication around a respiratory pandemic). Also, it's been 10+ months, so to the degree that developed countries like the US lack sufficient PPE manufacturing, it's certainly not down to resources or capabilities (or anything besides political will in the US considering the DPA could be invoked at any time).

Also, most countries still seem to be ignoring the best/cheapest way to control spread via rapid testing and isolation. This has been not only modeled extensively at this point [1][2], but also proven to be effective by sports leagues (NBA, MLB) and Universities (look at where UIUC has kept their numbers vs the state: https://go.illinois.edu/COVIDTestingData )

[1] Larremore, Daniel B, Bryan Wilder, Evan Lester, Soraya Shehata, James M Burke, James A Hay, Milind Tambe, Michael J Mina, and Roy Parker. “Test Sensitivity Is Secondary to Frequency and Turnaround Time for COVID-19 Surveillance.” Preprint. Infectious Diseases (except HIV/AIDS), June 25, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.22.20136309.

[2] Atkeson, Andrew, Michael C. Droste, Michael Mina, and James H. Stock. “Economic Benefits of COVID-19 Screening Tests.” National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3386/w28031.

Consider the countries like Japan that do not actually have excess mortality despite COVID-19. Suppose they just stopped testing for it. You would not be able to tell the difference. You could then come up with any reason for this “huge success”.

Sure, then copy Vietnam or Australia.

One way to regain control is to mass produce cheap rapid test kits, do a couple of mass testing events where significant percentage of population is tested to identify all clusters, isolate and trace from there. See Slovakia as an example.

Moderna has received a lot of government funding despite not ever making a profit as a private institution.

I find this argument unconvincing. The UK is an island, and it's doing badly. "But it's highly connected with the rest of the world, so it makes it honorarily a non-island!" Okay, sure. How about South Korea? It isn't an island, and it's doing pretty well. "But it's de facto an island, it's not getting cases from North Korea!" Okay, sure. But by that standard the US is an island: it didn't get its cases from Mexico or Canada.

And, of course, China has more land borders than any other country in the world, and it's managed to engineer the most drastic turnaround of any country in the world.

Having a small number of entry points is useful to limit initial inoculations, but internal policy and cultural cohesion are key for preventing the explosion of any successful inoculation into national disaster, regardless of a polity's geography.

Sigh, this old canard again. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore are all doing fine without "locking people into their homes" and they're not islands.

(Ok, Singapore technically is an island but it's connected to Malaysia by the world's busiest border crossing; and Thailand's grappling with a new outbreak now but it seems to be improving.)

The UK is no island?

And the new strain was first recorded on September 16th. It's laughable to think it hasn't spread further (although hopefully I'm wrong on this).

This variant is already widespread. It is very unlikely that it is not already spreading in the US.

What I’ve seen discussed is that closing borders only works if it’s done totally and immediately. Otherwise, it just slows response and causes super spreader events like we saw early this year in the US.

I’ve been thinking about this as well, they also kept their borders open to US citizens despite most countries closing them.

Perhaps Brexit closing trade doors with the EU could be resulting in a stronger relationship between the US & UK?

Makes it harder for doctors to get supplies if all the borders are closed.

The UK has an upcoming COVID vaccine (the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford one) that may prove useful in the near future. Cut off the UK from the rest of the world and the rest of the world can't benefit from it.

Also, it's almost certain that the UK strain is in the US already, and the US is shit at dealing with pandemics once they're on our soil. Border closures only work if your test/trace/isolate institutions and compliance with social distancing is good enough to eradicate the virus from within your borders; they prevent reinfection in that case. The US has shown we're completely incapable of that, so it really doesn't matter.

Any new precedent for completely closing borders between developed nations for any reason is bad. Because it creates a “we did this before.”

Even if the scale or details of circumstance are different—such as Clinton’s pardoning of his brother in minimizing Trump’s choices.

Another reason is exceptions cause outrage. And there may be many instances of diplomatic or other government travel that needs to happen or happen in the slipstream of limited public travel.