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Comment by ridewinter | Hacker News Reader

Not too long ago a headline like this would be absolutely massive news. Now it barely even registers. Crazy times...

I like to think of it as a good indicator that people do often consider the circumstances rather than just have a knee jerk reaction.

I mean, it’s not like it’s because we’re going to war with them. They’re just trying to protect their people. A lot of whom are elderly.

If we were smart we would ban people from leaving and entering the US, instead of waiting for another country to ban travelers from here.

Banning people from leaving would be the true dystopian action.

I wonder if this pandemic will have long lasting effects on international travel. It seems possible that going into the future stricter health screening may become routine and certain travel restrictions may stay in place for a prolonged period of time. Same goes for certain other measures I guess.

Not that long lasting, at least for country/continental blocks. As soon as vaccines are widely available, I'd expect that the only thing that remains from the corona crisis is a visa/immigration requirement of proof of vaccination/immunity.

A basic rule-of-thumb is this is a 1 in 100 year event; because the last time something comparable happened was the Spanish Flu.

However, a hypothesis that international travel is the major enabler reduces this to more of a 1 in 20 year event (SARS, MERS, Ebola, etc, etc all were near misses that were a little less slippery). Swine flu was also pretty bad.

We might be able to afford this once a century. We can't afford to do this once every 20 years. It is quite possible that it makes economic sense to permanently cripple international travel by introducing mandatory 2-week quarantines on arrival or somesuch.

I'd say it makes more sense to lift poor countries/regions out of poverty and introduce basic sanitation/hygiene standards as well as to reduce mass animal farming and antibiotic/antiviral usage there.

Prevent stuff going bad at the root cause rather than trying to limit its effects.

As a potential counter point - pandemics are generally rare. And are hard to test at airports for until it's too late.

Also you can't test for every disease, especially new ones. The best you could do is a several week quarantine on all incoming travelers I would think?

Do you think it's going to be viable moving forward to quarantine as standard operating procedure?

not for any country where tourism is a significant source of revenue.

Tourism is incredibly popular and makes up something like 10% of the world GDP. An outcome that permanently ends international tourism is very unlikely, especially given the number of previous pandemics that haven't caused that.

Yes. With the 15 minute test and this being a major issues for years sans a vaccine? I imagine there will be LOTS of testing going on related to travel, work, and all sorts of things.

Some airports already checked your temperature on entry. It might become more common now.

With all we know about our citizens I would love to see a wordlwide pandamic prevention travel policy that isn't activated but rather part of the fabric of travel. It could be automatic to start screening and potentially banning travel from somewhere reporting an outbreak.

Instead we had to wait for all the dominoes to fall and the lethargic arm of bureaucracy to move into action.

With a more rapid and precise response we might be able to avoid huge shutdowns like we have been seeing.

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