Eliminating Covid stopped being an option roughly around January 2020. The partial elimination you seem to be implying with "as much as possible" was never an option. It was always all or nothing.
Even NZ gave up on our island defence once Omicron got in. We'd managed to stave off widespread Delta, but Omicron was far more transmissible, but also, far less lethal, and its arrival and spread came just after we started vaccinating.
So by then the cost/benefit analysis made it clear that reopening, while bringing more sickness, would ultimately cost less than not.
The isolation caused some havoc in our economy that we're still recovering from, but large amounts of excess deaths brings its own economic impacts that would likely have been far worse.
Right, and they had the "advantages" of having no limitations on government power, and assigning no value to individual freedom. If they couldn't do it, it's lunacy to believe that anyone else could.
