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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

If you're worried about the environment you can just add a carbon recapture tax to gas.

Banning travel between large areas is ridiculous and wouldn't happen. Especially when a policy of quarantine during outbreaks would be equally effective with a vastly smaller cost.

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Quarantine completely failed to prevent what was a highly localized disease globally in 2 months. We need to accept it’s simply ineffective across international borders unless draconian measures are applied before they seem required. We might get through this with 100,000 people dying globally or 100,000,000 it’s completely unknown at this point. But, should the second happen expect some significant changes to happen for years if not decades.

PS: China’s case fatality rate broke 4%, though they likely undercounted cases by ~50% if not more.

What country even quarantined everyone coming in on a plane?

I might have been unclear, but I was suggesting quarantine for everyone coming in, as an alternative to banning travel forever.

Quarantine set up once you already have an outbreak is uh, a different matter.

Internal travel was suspended between several countries, though far to late to make a significant difference. A partial list: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/coronavirus-travel-bans/i...

Saying they waited to long is true, but simply means it fails due to politics.

Edit: NM, misunderstood what you where referring to.

Yeah, far too late. I mean the equivalent of locking things down in January, not March.

A total travel ban would also fail due to politics, so that's not a really helpful criteria.

I think the list of things that people believe are 'ridiculous and would never happen' has greatly reduced in size in the last few weeks.

Also, there's a lot more to environmental destruction than excess carbon.

Outside of fuel and labor, the resources spent to enable travel are quite minor. I don't think trying to stop carbon-neutral travel helps the environment in a meaningful way.

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