It wasn’t necessarily obvious from the start, but the way to fight the pandemic was always to throw whatever possible at developing vaccines while observing voluntary measures to slow the spread of infections.
Involuntary measures have been damaging to the economy and to public trust; I’d even suggest that the mass vaccine refusal that we’re still seeing in some parts of the country is just blowback from being pushed around, often nonsensically, for more than a year.
To many people, Australia looked like a model, but its strategy of locking out the whole world has only worked at a terrible cost. Now many of their trading partners are ready to return to normal, and their citizens want to come back, and they can’t.
It’s also possible that the Fortress Australia strategy won’t work at all against the much more contagious delta variant. While life is pretty much back to normal in the United States, for them it’s not going to be normal for a very long time.
We should remember this for the next pandemic: Do everything possible for a vaccine. Vaccination has a lower social cost than almost any of the other things we’ve tried AND it’s likely to be the most effective response.