[St Charles Owl]

Australia and New Zealand went all out for a zero covid strategy and it worked.

Problem is they need to build up immunity via vaccination, but their uptake has been terrible and there have been serious supply problems. Looking at the media it seems the public are quite resistant to it as well.

Also note that NZ, under Ahern's leadership, and roughly the same size as Scotland with a similar sized population, has only lost 27 people to COVID since Feb 2020 - a massive difference in response, swift mitigation measures and unpopular tough decisions.

Although being a small island and being remote absolutely helped them. But both them and Australia were adamant that closing the borders and not their domestic economy was the right move and it worked. Certainly that is more difficult, if not impossible in say the EU or even in the UK if Scotland had tried it but England didn't, where movement of people between places with effectively no border control could not be stopped.