Russia has halted all flights into and out of the country

Weirdly enough, I had a quick look at Heathrow arrivals and departures, and there's still loads of flights leaving every 10 minutes, to all kinds of destinations. Multiple flights per day to Rome - I guess if you absolutely, positively have to be in Italy right now! In comparison, my local airport in North of England had a single flight the entire day.

> get brits back from Australia

There is/was a commercial non-stop from Perth to Heathrow, and with how many people they'd be flying, you could also use a half-filled 787.

I suspect it’s the airports and aircraft themselves rather than the destination that’s at issue. Small isolated groups may become infected, but they are far less likely to infect others outside the group. Airports inherently mix people from large areas within a country together which crosses those boundaries.

How can you possibly fly while social-distancing? Even in first class.

I believe there are at least three issues:

1. My guess is that you're right, the main reason this is happening is a nationalistic wish to blame others for the spread.

But also:

2. As other commentators have noticed, it's difficult to socially distance in an airport. On the plane itself, there is extremely good ventilation and what limited evidence I've seen suggests that transmission is low, but in airports that might not be the case (I'm not sure).

3. Air crew may refuse to fly. Of course there are many other service professions in which enormous numbers of staff are being asked to expose themselves to a high risk of infection ... but almost all of those staff are (sadly) easy to replace if they refuse, whereas pilots are not.

Hugely. Taiwan is an 'isolated island' with no outbreak i.e. no community spread. They have the 300 cases there nailed down. So anyone coming in the country is a source of contamination.

Otherwise - this is still a problem.

In my little regional city in Canada - cases are small and they've already peaked. Case load is small enough that we are now a 'landlocked' island. Within days we could feasibly 'go back to work' were we to be sure nobody is 'entering the bubble'. That won't be the case, but you see what I mean.

I think borders are a pretty big deal in terms of being able to contain this problem.

I suggest that in order to travel internationally in the next little while, it might be required to have a 'test card' indicating you're clean from COVID within the last x number of days for example.

Either that or everyone coming into a country has to isolate for x days.

Yes, it's reasonable to assume it's a contributor to the spread -- but I'm not sure what you mean by 'relevant'. Significant? (un)controllable? Worth bothering with?

I can't find the article now, but a week or two ago Singapore and South Korea (IIRC) were claiming most of their new cases were imports, as they'd been approaching some level of control (via tracking & testing) within their borders.

Because different countries have wildly different attitudes, policies, and procedures - the best place to enforce domestic controls are at your own border.

As you say, domestic travel can and will also spread the virus, but that doesn't mean you throw arms in the air and accept all travellers from everywhere.

Take a look at Vietnam and Singapore. Both clamped down hard back in January. They were keeping their numbers quite low (<100), especially impressive considering Vietnam is 100M people.

Once the virus spread to other countries and they started to shutdown, a lot of Singapore and Vietnamese nationals returned home. Contact tracing indicated that almost 100% of new cases were people returning from overseas.

Last I checked Singapore has close to 1,000 cases and Vietnam almost 300.

To answer your question, yes, stopping international travel can have a big impact on controlling the disease.

That would be my assumption as well. I would hypothesize that once the virus is well seeded within a country, the contribution by new travelers is dwarfed by internal propagation.

Using the famous Washington Post simulation as a reference:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-si...

I imagine it's like the second scenario in reverse. Rather than the wall opening, picture it closing after the virus is already spreading uncontained on either side.

Of course, it could be a significant factor in keeping the outbreak initially contained. But that involves an even more fanciful assumption in my view: that you could impose and really tightly enforce a ban early enough to matter. The continued pressure from Trump and many of his political allies to "open the economy" -- and their resistance to "shutting it down" in the first place -- shows such a proposition, offered at a point it would have mattered (if that were even possible with the initial stonewalling by China on the severity of the outbreak) would almost certainly have been cried down as paranoia and overreaction by the kind of business and political interests who hold real influence over these matters.

Based on what I've read about how and where the outbreaks started, I'm pretty sure that when this is over and the analysis comes in, air-travel will get the blame for the early and rapid spread of this virus. It looks clear that Taiwan's robust success is the result of immediate quarantine of travelers.

Two people recently flew into a Gwitchin community in the Yukon expecting to live off the land. They were quickly (and angrily) isolated and flown back to Whitehorse by the RCMP.

It was announced during the tournament with a grace period, which has now expired. I feel bad for Rajubov who actually predicted this happening and they kicked him out of the tournament.

Maybe because they started testing early? Their first cases were in January and they screened everyone in airports since then [0], they performed 639606 tests with 4731 positives. [1][2]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-health-pneumonia-russi...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing

This is absolutely false. Just one more fake news about Russia.

WHO's bad advice is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. I watched their conferences in January. Simultaneously heaping praise on China for their effective quarantines while demanding other countries not cut off flights from China because there was little risk. If every country ignored them and stopped travel, or said every person entering the country has to spend X days in quarantine, this could have been contained. And that's only one part of WHO's failure.

The WHO is in China's pocket and is doing the bidding of CCP. Their advice is not to be trusted.

I am a Russian living abroad. I know literally no one coming back to Russia for Easter. It's the first time I even heard of this idea.

Summer or New Year are the times when Russians are more likely to go to visit their relatives and friends.

This comment shows how little westerners know about Russia and Russians. Easter is of very little importance in Russia, especially for Russians living abroad.

For religious Russians abroad there are Orthodox churches in almost every country, even in Thailand and Cambodia.