Hacker News Reader

Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons, but it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count, which means this will have almost no effect.

I actually think banning travel from China months ago was a good call, but by analogous reasoning, the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week.

View on HN

>I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons

No, Ireland is also exempt. In other words, the US is banning travel from the Schengen Zone.

Do you have an official source on that?

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting...

Thanks, this wasn't clear at all from Trump's announcement.

Doesn't mean it's not still partly political, to be clear.

It's rational. UK epidemic is not yet out of control. If you look at the region breakdown in UK the cases are very well geographically distributed, the highest concentration as of yesterday is Hertfordshire with only 13 cases, or London with 100 cases if you consider that one administrative unit. Some epidemics in Schengen are highly focused on specific areas which means the growth rate can be expected to be higher. It makes sense to consider Schengen as one unit as it has open borders. It would make little sense to ban travel from individual countries in Schengen.

> it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count

And it's ahead of some Schengen countries.

Besides that, it is the 'per capita' part that matters and there are great differences between the various countries as to how many tests have been administered, leading to severe discrepancies in the relative pictures between countries.

"I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons"

Like extraditing Julian Assange while the world is looking elsewhere.

Don't let a crisis go to waste. Probably same reason for EARN act.

> the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week.

The US had active uncontained clusters, and was known to have them, two weeks ago. Once that's true, there's no way that mere travel numbers are going to move that needles significantly.

Again: we banned travel from China and it was too late already. This does not work. And I'm horrified at the number of people on this site that don't see that.

Banning travel isn't a magic cure-all that guarantees zero cases, it just lowers the initial caseload. That's extremely important because exponential growth is extremely slow in the beginning -- it takes as long to go from 1 to 100 as 100 to 10,000. If banning travel reduces 100 starter cases to 1, you double the time you have.

Problem being, best information is there is no solid numbers on initial case load in the US, for structural reasons. So while your argument may be correct, it may be too late for this to make a difference (perhaps with equal likelihood, but we don't know.)

Yeah, I'd agree with that. At this point it would help a tiny bit, but only because it slightly decreases links between people, like a social distancing measure does.

Some commenters on this post are having a hard time acknowledging this aspect. I think every little bit helps, this included

Every little bit also has a cost, and it's possible for the cost to outweight the benefits, especially when a decision is made without even considering the cost.

True and fair point with which I agree. I don't know all the considerations that went into this decision but I lean towards supporting such plans that limit unnecessary chances for exposure

It won't. Screening all arrivals is helpful, but just shutting down travel is going to end up creating a whole new class of problems.

Medical officers (and Italy) tell us that screening arrivals doesn't help.

I was thinking more for data gathering purposes and so on before the healthcare system collapses under the weight of exponential growth. But I take your point.

> it just lowers the initial caseload

If it's done in time to prevent the bulk of that initial caseload, which is almost certainly not the case here.

I beg to differ. US was the first major country to ban travel from China. Other countries only followed suit after. South Korea, Japan, France, Germany and Italy never did, and see where they are now.

Please do not spread disinformation: Italy banned direct flights from China pretty quickly too.

It did not matter, because patient-0 in Europe was a German. It’s now accepted that the virus arrived by crossing the Alps in some sort of Euro-business trip, not directly from China.

So banning international travel could have at least stopped it from reaching Germany. I think you are making his point while arguing on a technicality. I see no conceivable way that the economic loss of tourism or "business trips" is worse than what is about to go down in Europe.

The infection in Germany happened mid-January, when the Chinese had not even fully admitted to the problem. Chances are it had already reached all continents by the time any travel ban was even considered.

Unless you can read minds, these things happen very quickly now that the world is a global village.

> is worse than what is about to go down in Europe.

It's going down in the US too! We're merely a few days behind. If we had no cases, or a few contained clusters, then this would be an arguably useful policy. We have multiple uncontained outbreaks already, and have yet to enact meaningful policies to contain them.

It's too late. All this ban does is try to shift blame.

The reason the UK is behind continental Europe is the lack of testing. Their numbers are no worse than continental Europe (excluding Italy, of course). The US, on the other hand, are lightyears behind Europe on testing, the real number of infections is closer to 5000 than to 1250, again bringing it in line with the rest of Europe.

Actually the UK has done a lot more testing than many other countries, more than double the rate of France, and 4x of Japan -

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

I don't know where you get that info from but it is severely outdated or just outright wrong.

Not sure where they get their data, but where I live (Ontario, Canada) we've done 231.5 tests per million people.

Number of tests: 3395 Source: https://www.ontario.ca/page/2019-novel-coronavirus Population: 14,659,616 (estimated for 2019-Q4 found on Wikipedia)

>Not sure where they get their data

The source for each of the figures is in the last column of the table.

Did you just want to post Ontario's numbers (Canada was not in the table at all) or are you questioning the accuracy of the worldometers page?

>The reason the UK is behind continental Europe is the lack of testing

Can you elaborate on this with some sources?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com