@grrrr_shark I thought that at that point it was too late, because you can't really permanently isolate oneself from abroad effectively enough without going to the lengths NZ went to (which I don't think would have been practical even in short term, given the count of Grenzgänger).

So, we had a R of below-or-about-1 _in summer_, including the effects of contact tracing. Unless Covid was *completely* extirpated (which is infeasible given international traffic), getting case count not to grow significantly would require keeping R below 1[*] over winter. At that time I thought it was mostly infeasible to do so (while taking into account what one can do without nontrivial adverse effects on people) taking into account the implementation woes that were already apparent at that time.

If various things worked as they should (e.g. contact tracing doing things with reasonable thoroughness and latency, lack of the whole confusion around masks that kept not even suggesting more effective masks, lack of concentration on surface cleaning to exclusion of everything else (and sometimes even to detriment of everything else) etc.) then maybe we would be able to do so?

[*] sadly, effectiveness of contact tracing gets worse with more cases, because it's not trivial to train more people (that we've failed to do so ahead of time is one of the implementation woes)