@Jeffro: you’re just cherry-picking data now. What about Belgium? Italy? UK? They have twice and even three times the death rate. They are also, like the US in the middle of major trade routes and thus have a lot of international travel.
Australia is not very densely populated. Their major cities are roughly the size of Chicago and their capital the size of LA. There are literally more travelers passing through LA than the entire Australia continent though.
Major populations of sick travelled to the US and EU from China in the hopes of treatment while China welded their apartments shut. When Trump closed the borders, they poured in through Toronto and Vancouver as well as Mexico.
There is a reason certain areas got hit harder. It wasn’t for lack of lockdowns, as wherever the lockdowns happened was hit harder. The question is how the government responded to its aftermath. The EU did practically nothing, while Trump shut the borders. The US funded the largest medical research program in history to create the fastest vaccine rollout in history. The EU funded less than $1.4B, China and Russia respectively funded $0.5B, the US funded $2T which is currently the only working vaccines (Sinovac is a coin flip and whatever the EU funded never got off the ground) benefiting the world.
