Chalking anything up to geography or density seems like a reach. Ireland and the UK are islands and are doing rather poorly. South Korea has high density. Canada has low density, but a highly urbanized population. It’s done better than the US which has similar urbanization but worse than the nations that I mentioned earlier.
England is an island in geography, but it has a lot of truck (lorry) traffic to and from the continent, via ferries and the rail line under the channel. It's not just containerized freight, the trucks with drivers drive on and drive off the other modes of transit.
Being an island isn't required; you need effective border controls, and effective control of population behavior. It's just a lot easier to have effective border control with an island; but England certainly didn't make use of that possibility.
Right it's pretty fucking willy-nilly no matter the conditions you are testing for correlation. The nations you mentioned all had pretty different public responses as well.
That is why I think it's dangerous to proclaim lockdowns are a panacea because with a few exceptions you end up with similar results but a fucked economy
But the real tragedy is the lack of support for third world countries due to the contraction of the global economy. Millions will die due to a reduction in vaccines and treatable illnesses in the developing world. Millions. But it seems we are okay with that as long as _we_ don't get covid
It's dangerous because poorly executed lockdowns can be counterproductive. New cases are currently higher in many locked-down states than they are in Florida - this is of course a multifactorial process, but part of the story has to be that people have stopped complying with the lockdowns.
