Tribune. Until recently, two strategies to fight the pandemic were being considered: zero Covid or “live with”. The situation has become more complex with the Delta variant, which is more contagious. Vaccination coverage, as broad as possible, is currently the preferred solution.
Differences persist, however. They can be viewed from two dimensions: the ability to isolate populations and the ability to obtain vaccines. The intersection of these two dimensions makes it possible to better understand the political choices made.
The first dimension is the choice of isolation which depends on the capacity to implement such a policy; some countries achieve this thanks to their geography, such as New Zealand or Singapore; others, such as North Korea and China, employ the heavy-handedness of authoritarian regimes.
A question of resilience
Whatever the main lever, these countries share a low population density or a great acceptance of local or general containment decisions. This implies a strong resilience of the populations and a full confidence in the policies taken and / or a complete acceptance.
In this case, countries can have a very strict health control policy. Arrivals and departures are under tight control. At the slightest warning, drastic measures are put in place to avoid the extent of the contagion. The areas concerned are immediately isolated from the rest of the territory. For these countries, the virus eradication policy has prevailed until now.
However, social interactions and the exchange of thoughts with the outside world take place almost exclusively at a distance. Other countries have poor isolation capacity and the idea of “living with the virus” has prevailed. These are countries whose borders are defined as porous, geographically but also by political construction.
France is by definition an open country
The member countries of the European Union, (EU) including France, are part of it. Closing the borders is therefore neither realistic nor economically desirable. France is by definition an open country. A closure would raise the question of cross-border workers and tourists. Above all, it would require an infrastructure that we have not had for a long time and whose implementation is difficult to imagine in the short term.
The low isolation capacity also concerns countries whose economy is almost exclusively oriented towards tourism. These states are faced with a trade-off between the deleterious effects of the lack of entry of wealth by the absence of tourists, and the control of the expansion of the Covid-19 virus on their territory.
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