Résumé
Are international boundary lines likely to be the best places to implement health policies to control the spread of COVID-19 and, if not, then why? This paper explores various options and debates a number of policy alternatives. It explores what the biological borders of the COVID-19 virus mean to human communities in a context where immunization is not yet available. The arguments suggest focusing on counter-intuitive policy approaches that underscore the limited effectiveness of an international boundary line lockdown, as an effort to stop the virus spread. Border policies related to COVID-19 spread require novel thinking about borders and about the reach of health policies to control and eradicate the pandemic. Three public governance approaches are discussed in turn: Virus mitigation, Virus suppression, and Virus elimination. All three rely on individualising virus hosts from their communities, not entire communities from each other's: social distancing leads to mitigating policies;contact tracing leads to suppression, and quarantining, testing and surveillance to elimination. Neither requires the closure of the international boundary lines of a country but ‘elimination' that ultimately leads to a positioning of the ecological/biological border of the virus between two hosts. Indeed, with appropriate policy alignments constituencies may be able to implement biological boundaries within or across countries, cities or other regions of the world that are virus free. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.