Quote Originally Posted by sihnfahl View Post
Which comes back down to one of the major issues: being able to actually halt the early spread. Experience has shown that: well, that's not going to work very well.
Depends on how early. When the biolab in London accidentally exposed people to smallpox, they were able to quickly lock it down and stop the spread. However, we're talking a quarantine of 260 people and vaccination of 500. Not a trivial incident, but certainly much, much smaller than Covid became.

And that worked, completely. No Smallpox roaming around out there.

I don't know where the line is, and I suspect exact numbers vary depending on specifics of disease, but it clearly is possible to stop it below some threshold if we know fast enough. For Covid that didn't work out, but most diseases do not become pandemics. It's probably our best thing to focus on going forward. Measures like closing borders don't really matter if the disease has already substantially crossed.