Countries like Australia & New Zealand & Japan & South Korea are applauded for their countercontagion success. But it's for this very reason - their success - that an eventual reckoning with the reality of this pandemic may well be, for these nations, the bitterest of all. 1/9

The hardest thing for people in the years ahead will be coming to terms with the fact that all their sacrifice to "stop" this pandemic has been futile. Even when C19 is "under control", the cases keep limping along & the virus will not get to zero & stay there. 2/9

Say a vaccine gets developed very soon, and is efficiently produced to be administered at the levels required. No one is seriously considering the time it takes to vaccine millions and millions of people. 3/9

For instance, if Australia can vaccinate 10,000 people a day nonstop year round, & the herd immunity threshold is 80%, that's 5.5 years to immunize the country. The border is going to stay closed all that time? It'll reopen with permanent 14 day quarantines for all entering? 4/9

Remember, as it opens the border, it's got a super low herd resistance since it was so "successful" at limiting the virus. So it's all the easier for uncontrolled spread to take hold now. And what if it's 2022 and there isn't actually a vaccine? What if there never is one? 5/9

What if these countries actually have to then make the conscious choice after all this "success" to actually just bin it & accept the virus has to go through the population in order for the international borders to be openable & opened again? 6/9

I can't imagine anything more painful than having given my means, my mental & physical well-being, my social freedom to "control" COVID & then realising that I was so "successful" I now actually had to make an active decision to junk everything & stop suppressing the virus... 7/9

...because the borders can't stayed closed forever & what was always clear becomes finally unavoidable: that being part of the globe in a global pandemic means there's no other way out but through with the rest & going down this road was madness to begin with. 8/9

All Australia & New Zealand in particular have achieved is desychronizing themselves from the rest of the world -- setting themselves up to be the last countries on earth to be finished with the pandemic. Hopefully, it doesn't take getting all the way to 2022 to grasp it. 9/9