Good luck with suppressing the virus in the US while 5 billion people in the world get infected.
What about the hundreds of thousands or millions [0] of illegal border crossings every year at the mexican border though?
[0] Naturally good stats for this are impossible to find, but in FY19 851,508 individuals were apprehended at the american southwest border [1]. It seems reasonable to assume the same order of magnitude of people successfully crossed.
> Sky News understands the [UK] Government has asked mobile network O2 to hand over anonymous mobile phone location data in order to ensure people are following social distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 outbreak
I suspect it's at least being discussed.
(I'm also skeptical that stopping illegal immigrants will be as simple as tracking phones, but whatever)
China is down to zero cases. South America except for the two black sheep (Mexico and Brazil) is shutting down (Peru had curfew-in-place since the weekend; anyone even driving their car outside is arrested). Europe is also going there, plus Israel, several Arab countries, etc.
Only big black sheeps right now are the US, parts of Europe, India, and Africa (which is only now getting their first wave).
Zero own cases, they still have imported cases. And that only means no cases that are symptomatic.
And zero cases just means zero cases now not in the future.
This thing spreads like a common cold. More infectious than a flu. You can't suppress common cold.
Not forever.
Humanity never eradicated a disease without a vaccine.
SARS within the last 2 decades? Look, I think eradication is a pipe dream at this point, but it'd be worth mildly checking your facts before posting.
e: If I'm getting flagged, at least tell me why?
I could be wrong but that's how I remember it.
I think we don't get human cases because jumping to humans again is quite hard for SARS.
Seems to me that the virus that can spread among humans is a different version than the one common among the animal population.
I think so:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_06_19/en/
> Seems to me that the virus that can spread among humans is a different version than the one common among the animal population.
Not necessarily. Ncov that spreads in humans came to be in bats and skipped effortlessly to other species including humans with no meaningful changes.
What about places with wars going on... Syria? Yemen? Afghanistan? What about places with no functional government (which I will decline to list to avoid pointless arguments)?
It doesn't need to be a big black sheep to re-introduce this... it only takes one case.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/asia/india-coronavi...
Excerpts:
The authorities used GPS technology, CCTV footage and mobile phone records to trace the movements of one Indian family believed to be among the first infected here. They returned from Italy in late February, and within days, medical teams fanned out to all the places they had visited including banks, restaurants and churches and quickly quarantined just about everyone they had come in contact with — nearly 1,000 people.
India was also one of the first nations to essentially shut its borders, canceling visas and denying entry to all but a select few foreigners. Some states, such as Kerala, are beginning to beef up internal borders, taking the temperature of passengers in cars and screening people on trains.
Do you think their poor can eat if they self-isolate? If you are hungry then you keep working, you have few choices to avoid social contact, and you have few resources to help you if you are sick.
Do you think India has the capacity to test enough people to effect efficient blocks against transmission? Do you trust their bureaucracy to mostly act decisively and effectively for the majority?
Do they have the social mores to cooperate with rules to prevent transmission? (I’m not judging, I have some very conscientious Indian acquaintances, I’m just unsure about the population on average).
At least they will have some medicine - they produce a lot and they stopped exporting many drugs on the 4th March.