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Comment by Exmoor | Hacker News Reader

As insane as it seems I imagine we'll see closed borders in many countries for a long, long time (months, maybe years?). It's going to be very hard to justify risking even a small chance of introducing additional virus cases if you've just spent the last few months trying to get a point where even minimal non-"essential"* can begin to reopen there's going to be very little support for any increased risk of any kind.

*I put "essential" in quotes here because I believe the definition of essential changes the longer services are closed. For instance, a dentist isn't really essential when they're closed for a month, but a 3 month closure is going to be increasingly problematic for people needing something more than a standard cleaning.

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Years? IMO, looking at the stats of Western European countries, who are all slowly lessening restrictions, typically showing both carrot and stick (“we think x will be allowed again in w weeks, if you all keep following the rules”), unlikely, at least not for countries with significant tourist industries. They will feel pressure to allow tourist visits, certainly from ‘safe’ regions such as Australia and New Zealand.

(Whether those tourists will go on holiday is another question. Tourists may be wary of going far away on holiday, and if social distancing will be compulsory inside planes, and trains, travel likely will become much more expensive)

It also will be hard for countries to withstand the pressure from their population to allow them to go on holiday in other countries.

In the end, the better choice may be to allow some tourist visits, as that may mean people will follow restrictive rules better than when they wouldn’t be allowed to have go on holiday/to make some money from tourism.

> They will feel pressure to allow tourist visits, certainly from ‘safe’ regions such as Australia and New Zealand.

As a New Zealander, I'm not sure that there would be much appetite for visiting any country outside this potential trans-tasman bubble for tourism purposes as we would be looking at a two week quarantine on returning home.

i don't think there will be much pressure from people wanting to leave. there are plenty of alternatives to go on holiday. how would that work anyways? people could complain or protest against local issues, but against a foreign country? which one? everyone wants to go somewhere different. rally up, pick a target and stage a demo infront of that country's embassy?

pressure is only going to come from inside from the tourism industry that is loosing out on income.

I imagine the tourism industry will suffer to some extent, but if NZ/AU residents are essentially restricted from traveling outside that zone, you may see an uptick of travelers who would have normally traveled outside that zone now choosing to vacation inside those two countries instead.

good point. local tourism may pick up some slack

You'd think so, but France has recently come out and said that they don't even plan to require 14 day quarantines for arrivals from the EU or UK.

The UK border, despite their having the highest death toll in Europe, is similarly comparatively open compared to most other anglophone countries.

The UK currently has nothing to fear from open borders: why worry about the risk of a planeload of cases when there's ten new planeloads* of homegrown coronavirus every day?

Everyone else, however, may well have something to fear from the UK...

* 747: 450 passengers; new cases 4400 (5 May)

Right now that's a really good point.

If the route out of lockdown is to test and trace, though, international travel without quarantine makes that pretty tough.

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