Not debating your point, but I want to point out that there is literally no overland travel between South America and North America because of the Darien Gap. If you want to get to the US from Bogota, you'll need to fly.
I guess the key point is being an “island” is not enough when you have 300M+ people with huge amounts of intermingling, and the virus has already taken hold.
Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.
> the virus was not widespread when the severity threat became apparent.
It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.
I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on.
And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap