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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Close the airports.

Remember when the outbreak just started and China aggressively closed off all travel (including by road) to/from Wuhan (and this was all going on near the Chinese New Year). It's a somewhat similar situation now in the US with a holiday that historically involved travel and large family gatherings, but I'm afraid that many government leaders have downplayed covid for so long that it'll be hard to get any compliance at this point, especially in the worst hit areas, which at some places are in full-blown collective denial.

You don't need compliance from the populace if you close the airports. Preventing them from driving is an entirely different proposition, but most people would not be able to make the drive due to time and distances involved. So closing the airports would probably be pretty effective, if you also shut down trains. The airlines would hate it, but the car rental places would see a boost.

(Not sarcastically), I would really love to know how much this would help. I read a statistic once that the majority of people live within 8 miles of where they were born. If that's true, then although there are is a lot travel in airports during Thanksgiving, a large portion of the people would be unhindered by this.

If you live that close then you probably already see family semi-often so 'traveling' for Thanksgiving makes little difference. So the probability that you/one group doesn't have the virus and the other hasn't is already low since both groups live in the same region and would have already transmitted it to each other.

If you live far enough that you have to fly then you most likely have a completely separate social sphere where you live plus traveling by plane means being close to 100s of complete strangers. So the chance that one person/group is coming from a region with an outbreak to a non-outbreak region is higher and the risk of catching it during travel is higher.

It's just like ring security theory. Level 2 > Level 1 vs Level 3 -> Level 1.

Spot on. If your social circle already includes your family because you live one town over, feel free to have family thanksgiving with that limited social circle (so don't invite your grandparents from hours away, unless you call all afford to isolate for 1-2 weeks in advance!).

If you live in California and your family is in New Hampshire, please don't hop on a plane, risking infection, and potentially spread COVID from your social circle in California to your family's in New Hampshire.

Unfortunately, the combination of humans being bad at following instructions, folks being tired of COVID, and the high levels of stress this year are probably going to result in a lot of folks doing exactly this kind of stupid thing. I really wish we could close the airports for the week of Thanksgiving (refunding all flights that week) to give people a push towards responsibility, because they likely won't do it themselves.

While it's hard to predict the number of people who will travel outside their communities, I'd say the packed highways, airports, and buses during past holiday seasons mean that number's pretty high.

Is that statistic of 8 miles for the US or worldwide? I'd have to imagine countries with large populations of very poor residents would have a much different stat for that compared to the United States.

This article suggests the figure is 18 miles for the US.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...

It's from 2015 but I wouldn't expect the number to be too different today.

I think it's the U.S. I remember it thinking that statistic means that it is especially bad for people to use the challenge question of "What city were you born in?" If you know anything about the individual, you can probably just guess where they live now and be correct.

We should also lock people in their homes. Except the technocrats and politicians, they get a free movement pass.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/11/18/...

I think this issue has been so downplayed and politicised in the US that such a move is now essentially unthinkable.

You can see that in some of the rather predictable responses you've received. Of course, I don't think you literally mean "close all airports" – rather, a move to temporarily ban nonessential long-distance travel, which is a pretty normal tool that you'd expect to use to tackle a pandemic.

I'm in England just now—hardly the poster child for excessive restrictions–and pretty extensive limitations apply for the next two weeks for travel and gathering. This isn't anything that anybody particularly wants, but it definitely feels that the country has collectively shat itself to a lesser extent.

Really? I'm currently out of the country on a special visa which expires at the end of the month. I'm traveling for family/health reasons that couldn't wait, not for leisure or holiday. If the US forcibly closed the airports I'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

While that would certainly dent holiday travel, it wouldn't nearly be enough. The type of family gatherings being discussed here could happen just via driving. Even a more extreme mandate of "Close all state borders" wouldn't stop a student in their state college to drive a few hours back home for the holidays.

Looking at pre-Covid numbers from 2019, driving accounts (~55m) for more travel than flying (~36m) during the Thanksgiving period.[1][2]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/thanksgiving-travel-2019-... [2] https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/thanksgiving-travel-forecast/#:...

University students are pretty much obligated to go home for the holidays. My niece attends a state university where all the undergrad housing is closed as of now and through the end of the year. Final exams are happening remotely.

Which shows how uncoordinated this all is. A ton of schools where planning since August to go remote only after thanksgiving as they have no way of stopping students from visiting on thanksgiving but having them all come back afterwords is unthinkable. Therefore the only solution is to force them to leave completely at thanksgiving.

Every institution is enacting policies that make the sense for themselves but together are not great at actually stopping the pandemic.

>Which shows how uncoordinated this all is.

While the Federal response and some state responses have been horrible, I actually don't see it as inherently bad that schools have flexibility in deciding what they do based on their location, size, need for physical access to teach/lab work. Schools have indeed responded differently and some of that is simply different decisions by different administrations. But some of it is also recognizing that situations are different. And so far, schools do not seem to have been a particular problem in disease spread.

This particular school had a really weird thing where freshmen moved in and then went back home and came back a few days later, which seems like the worst possible idea. But, they've done in-person, on-campus classes for the whole semester and COVID hasn't been a disaster for either the student body or the surrounding town, so?

No, head of CDC fired in 3, 2, 1, ..

It would not surprise me. Someone on german TV called Trump's behaviour a "retaliation campaign against the country that did not want to elect him again" and it really feels like it.

https://www.tagesschau.de/kommentar/trump-letzte-monate-101....

Except Trump got record reelection votes. There were slightly more for the other guy.

It would be folly to underestimate how much support Trump has in this country.

This was no clear win -- we are very much a country divided.

Yeah, I was amazed to see Trump actually had a larger percentage of the popular vote in 2020 (47%) than he did in 2016 (46%).

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2016&o...

Edit: That's not to say Biden is not the clear victor, only that there are still A LOT of people who support Trump, and even people who didn't vote for him in 2016 who did vote for him this time.

2016 had a few more viable 3rd party candidates that did particularly well in certain areas (like McMullin in Utah)

> Edit: That's not to say Biden is not the clear victor, only that there are still A LOT of people who support Trump, and even people who didn't vote for him in 2016 who did vote for him this time.

I think people are taking what I'm saying out of context. I'm not saying that Biden didn't win the election.

I'm saying that this election isn't where this ends. The fact that other commenters had such a knee jerk reaction (yourself excluded) only proves it.

and a few points shy of 20% more votes than the first time.

> This was no clear win

Let's see:

Biden appears to have won got the highest share of the population (not share of those who actually voted) ever to vote for a Presidential candidate.

Biden got a clear popular majority.

Biden got a clear electoral majority (the exact same electoral majority the Trump camp declared a landslide in 2016.)

How on Earth is that not a clear win?

At this point, the “no clear win” argument from Trumpists is the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail saying “All right, we'll call it a draw” after all his limbs have been severed.

I'm not even a Trump supporter.

I'm just saying that it's a mistake to think that America resoundingly rejected Trump. He got roughly 11 million more votes the second time around. That puts him roughly on par with Ronald Reagan as far as popularity the second time around. In terms of raw votes, he's the most popular encumbent we've had period.

Biden's win is a pretty narrow percentage -- in the battleground states it came down to less than 1%.

This is very much an unsettled political question. If you think that that political movement has buttoned up and moved on, you're nuts. The results of this election are going to be in play in the mid-term elections and the next Presidential.

Feel free to downvote the unpopular truth.

> In terms of raw votes, he's the most popular encumbent we've had period.

In terms of raw votes, the ninth most popular US Presidential candidate in 2020 (several steps below Kanye West) is more popular than Washington in either election, John Adams, or Jefferson in his first election, and the major party loser of every election 1876 and later was more popular than every President up to, and including, Lincoln.

Raw votes are a stupid measure.

My problem is not with whether Biden won for a little or a lot, he won and that´s all that matters.

My problem is that 70+ million Americans (almost 1 in 4) voted for him... somehow thought that despite everything the person has done and said, 1 in 4 people actually think it was not reprehensible enough to not vote for him.

I really would have thought that the vote would have been 70% vs 30% or so for Biden but 70 million people! (plus all the ones that cannot/didn't vote but still support him)

6-7 million more votes is a clear win.

It's also a clearer win than he had vs. Hilary.

It's not even 6 million, but that's splitting hairs. He got nearly twice as many more people to vote for him the second time as the amount he lost by.

It's just funny to see how offended people get when you float the idea that half of their countrymen might disagree with them. And that that half has a meaningful political reality worthy of accounting for.

If despite those numbers, you still think we're "unified", you're just burying your head in the sand.

I'm not from the US and I didn't say the US was unified.

I'm saying the US system is a winner takes all system.

Biden was a clear win, even if he would have won with only 1 EC vote. He also had the popularity vote.

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