I think you are wrong... New Zealand may be able to rid itself of the virus, if it bars any travel to the country...it would have to replace North Korea as the new "hermit nation".

Germany keeps getting hit over and over again...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-reopening.html

In addition, your plan has a minor problem... compliance... how do you propose to enforce you lockdown or any of other proposals. We can't even get people to stop pulling down statues without threatening them with 10 years in jail.

Do you support locking up protesters... because before we opened up we had protesters against locking up.

Frankly, it is not our response that is not working, if people simply followed the guidelines the CDC put in place transmission rates would begin to decline... but even then in the end it will take herd immunity to stop the virus or it will simply get reintroduced into the population... unless of course, you are advocating we build a wall on both borders... good luck getting that funded.

And it won't work... Germany paid such a price that is has now opted to do selective lockdowns...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/german-economy-during-coronavirus-lockdown-saw-worst-month-ever.html

If we comply with the CDC guidelines of social distancing and wearing masks and follow the other protocols we will end up in about the same place as a lockdown... but unlike a lockdown we can sustain this marathon... rather than lead for short period of time before national exhaustion kicks in and we fall behind.

If you are correct, we could have done the same thing with the flu. Think about the hundreds of thousands of people that have died over the last 10 years... why not just lockdown and eliminate the flu once and for all... the answer is because you won't...

Herd immunity is very important, it has been the only thing effective at stopping a contagious virus. Alternatively, a cheap and effective therapy is the other option, but while an anti-viral is somewhere out there on the horizon... it is unlikely going to make any impact in the foreseeable future.

So for now herd immunity is the answer whether we get it through a vaccine or through infecting enough people who recover that the virus has a difficult time finding "new" hosts.

Some parts of the country are approaching partial herd immunity... so how will partial immunity help? Say previously, an infected person came into contact with 20 people with no immunity and there is a 10% chance that the person will be infected. Then the virus will be doubling every time someone gets infected. But say with advance contact tracing we reduce the number of people that an infected person comes into contact with and half of those people have a degree of immunity through previously having the infection or a vaccine. Then instead of say two people getting infected only .5 people will. At that rate the virus we be shrinking by half every cycle of infection.

Now if you combine that strategy with one that builds a powerful moat around the institutionalized at risk population where every worker or visitor is tested every day they plan to enter a facility, then the number of Covid 19 deaths will drop like a stone as the virus is moving through the healthy population.

This is the strategy that the US has the best chance of succeeding with. The more careful we are at following the CDC guidelines the more people will eventually get their "immunity" from a shot and not an encounter with the virus.