> This lockdown was meant to last for a week, it ended up only lasting for three days as that was all that was necessary to eradicate the virus.

It's really hard to buy this notion. 3 days is not long enough for symptoms to manifest after infection. There seems to have been a great deal of luck that this was all that was required. And like you said, it started from an extremely low basepoint. One that's basically impossible for more densely populated countries or cities given the situation.

A 3 day lockdown would have done nothing for NYC. Monitoring and enforcing the goings on of the 9 million people in the city itself (20.3 mil in the metro), given the size of the police force, would not have been possible.

When I speak of "the situation", I mean that it would have been nice if China had been more forthcoming about the pneumonia that developed late in 2019, rather than censoring and imprisoning their own public health professionals and front line workers, but that didn't happen. So here we are. It's easy to forget that conservatives were the ones sounding the alarm about a "Chinese virus" in January 2020. Trump wanted to end travel from that nation. He was told in no uncertain terms that he was a hysterical racist and that sensible policy never materialized.

> I wouldn't really describe it like that, but I suppose it depends on your definition of "remote". It's definitely heavily urban, and travel between different major cities is still high despite the large distances involved.

I looked at the aerial photographs. Chinese, Europeans, coastal Americans, would have a hard time thinking of such a place as "dense" or "urban". Certainly it's one of the most remote metros over 1 mil on the globe.

> "COVID is a hoax"

Covid isn't a hoax but it certainly was cynically exploited for political gain by Democrats who sensed this as their opening for the 2020 election. After the March lockdowns (the ones Trump agreed with at the time and helped implement), Democrats then encouraged the most destructive riots in American history (measured in dollars) for more cynical political gain. "White supremacy is the real virus", mass demonstrations all over the country during a pandemic. After we had all been locked in our homes. Insanity. Totally irresponsible.

This absolute nonsense, and the subsequent finger wagging and blame pointing at Trump, despite how widespread the virus had already become in March before we were able to react to it, was the breaking point for most conservative Americans, myself included. The hypocrisy was too much.

When American conservatives say "covid is a hoax", they largely mean the cynical response to it that I just described, and the effect it had on the American election, not that it literally doesn't exist. There are some absolute crazies on the far right who post nonsense about "5G", and unfortunately that spread to Australia, I'm sure. But I've never met such a person, and I have many connections to conservative states.

> If China managed to eradicate the virus in Wuhan, then it should have been possible for any developed country.

They're lying. The West used to not be so quick to take the word of authoritarian regimes, especially those so obsessed with the concept of "saving face". Covid still kills people to this day in China despite their unwillingness to be honest about cases and deaths.