This makes sense. The only question is why this wasn't done as soon as travel was restarted and tests became readily available across the world.
This is at least 6-9 months too late.
This is at least 6-9 months too late.
Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
"We're testing all international travelers" is gonna be hard to tag that way. "We're banning people coming in from China but allowing in US citizens or permanent residents untested and unscreened on those same flights" looks pretty dumb from an epidemiological standpoint.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
> “There’s no restriction on Americans going back and forth,” Klain said. “There are warnings. People should abide by those warnings. But today, 30 planes will land in Los Angeles that either originated in Beijing or came here on one-stops, 30 in San Francisco, 25 in New York City. Okay? So, unless we think that the color of the passport someone carries is a meaningful public health restriction, we have not placed a meaningful public health restriction.”
I remember being unimpressed with the timing, starting the ban right after the super bowl was over was a bad idea. And the US should have immediately started working towards testing all travelers.
This is seriously failed leadership in the US. I haven't heard from anyone on either side calling for such measures.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/th...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/12/alamo-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/40-times-trump...
Which is currently the case. For example, travel from Russia to the US is currently allowed, despite Russia having >3 million COVID cases, but travel from Finland (>37,000 COVID cases) and China (>97,000 COVID cases) is prohibited.
It's not even a quid-pro-quo, because Russia has banned travel from the United States (>22,700,000 COVID cases, FYI.)
If you want to stop travelers spreading COVID in the US, the first thing you should do is ban domestic travel, and the second thing you should do is to update the travel ban to include infection data from any point past ~April 2020.
If you're not willing to require someone flying from New York to Nashville to have a negative COVID test before getting on an airplane, you probably shouldn't spend too much time wringing your hands over someone flying from Hanoi to LA without one.
The real reason for why domestic flights don't require negative tests is because it's politically inconvenient for the government to ask for them, and because it would gut airline revenue. "Controlling the spread" plays second fiddle to matters of political expediency and money.
That, and it's much easier to impose restrictions on foreigners, even if, as of January 2021, those restrictions don't accomplish much.
China is doing great if those numbers can be trusted.
But Finland having 80x fewer cases when they have 25x fewer people isn't a big enough difference that I would say "much lower levels".
Which leads me to believe that the current travel bans have been made based on arbitrary political, rather than science-backed epidemiological reasoning.
I wonder what percent of asymptomatic positive cases pre-arrival testing actually catches. I’m sure that number also changes depending on how many days before traveling you’re allowed to get the test.
And to actually prevent COVID from entering the US, I think you would have needed all of that fully in place in January, or perhaps earlier.
Effectively what this would have meant is a total border closure for several months at the beginning of the year. I’m not sure if that would have literally been impossible, but I think it’s totally fathomable why that didn’t happen.
The absolute earliest I could see significant shutting down in the US would have been early March which is when companies started canceling events, etc.
I believe the current estimate is that there was uncontrolled community spread in the US by late February, and closing the borders to international travelers wouldn't have done anything to prevent its spread in the US.
I was supposed to head on to another fairly small event in Tahoe the next week but the Thursday before, they canceled it. Which TBH seemed excessive to me at the time. (Though CA was starting to see an increase in cases.) I got home, did some shopping before everything went crazy but about a week later offices were closing, etc.
The West displayed an enormous level of incompetence same as the Chinese authorities but you can at least understand why the CCP cadre in Wuhan was so negligent. There is something in the human brain that makes people incapable of recognizing danger until they experience it.
Yes, and those are what US has in abundance, but does not use for some reason.
I believe every international airport has quarantine zones, and US has quite extensive TB quarantine infrastructure it could've reused.
Lastly, it could've finally put its incarceration industry to some good use.
It's very much like US found it had many months worth of PPE stockpiles laying forgotten in diffent institutions long after US spent hundreds of millions to rush order it from China.
Some of this is now present in parts of the US, such as New York state: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-travel-advisory
But indeed this wasn't in place at the start of the pandemic, and New York's ability to enforce it is quite weak.
Do we know if the new US federal order will allow the unreliable rapid tests to meet the requirement? Canada's similar requirement, added last Thursday, insists on either a PCR test or an RT-LAMP test. Edit: the wording in the CDC's FAQ requires a "viral test (NAAT or antigen)". I guess that does include the unreliable rapid kind.
The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
Even single breaches of their 100% quarantine of all arrivals caused outbreaks, and they also closed state borders.
This requirement begins to make sense now there is a vaccine, as within the US the curve should bend down vs the rest of the world, without the vaccine it wouldn't have achieved anything.
I don't know why it is ignored, but Vietnam (population 90M) is a large country with many land borders, including a border with China, and it has done spectacularly well containing the coronavirus.
Not to take anything away from the island countries but having no land borders makes limiting the influx of Covid much simpler.
I don't know much about Vietnam's borders and how much crossing there was in pre-Covid times but perhaps it should be the Covid success model that all non-island nations emulate.
Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam have all had good overall success.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/16/thailand-cambo...
Air travel, however, has been permitted all along, and mostly from what I can tell because of the fact that the airline industry would go bankrupt otherwise. So there's still people coming into Canada from the US constantly by air, and likely breaking their 14 day quarantine period, too. I know of some personally.
International travel is still being promoted heavily by airlines, despite governments giving official guidance to not go. Big scandals here in the last couple weeks about politicians taking off for tropical vacations, after instating tough lockdown rules and telling the public not to travel.
Canada also instituted the negative test on arrival rule in the last week or so. The caterwauling from our airlines was just ridiculous.
The federal governments in both Canada and the United States failed to make moves against travel early on, and they just let it coast for months, as if this virus was just going to go away on its own, because they were afraid of bankrupting the airlines.
The negative test requirement is only for air travel, and in spite of your assertion, there is (limited) non-trade travel allowed across the border. I'm driving across the border in a few weeks, and for some reason don't need a test that I'd need if I flew.
Taiwan is another such success story (7 deaths total, zero domestic cases for over 200 days) and it's not exactly that isolated from, well, the place where the pandemic started.
Then it was a matter of rapid COVID tests not being available. It probably should been a few months ago.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
Let's not forget that President Trump's order for closing the borders with even just the source nation of the contagion was labeled by the incoming President-elect as xenophobic[1]:
>> "We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency."
[1]: https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370
Back in the day before Mexico required passports to enter, many people lived in Tijuana and worked in San Diego. I'm sure this still happens today, and of course, you have to consider that many migrants work in US farms, etc.
No measures are 100%, but they don't need to be.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...
Trump floated the idea of cancelling flights, initially from China, cause that was the only hot spot, back in Winter only to be called a racist.
More like a maginot line than a fortress.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/coronavirus-us-travel-rest...
I'm not sure there was a point where travel was ever _stopped_? At least not for US citizens or residents. This is not to say the test requirement should not have been imposed (much) earlier, however!
Even without tests being widely available it would have been wise to require all arrivals to quarantine, as Taiwan has done with great success.
Yeah, sure, that would have been a nuisance for quite a few people and painful for the airline industry, true, but nowhere near as annoying and painful as things have ended up now.
Good for our constituants? check
Good for whoever pays for my campaign? check
Oh, you say it will jeopardize my reelection? fuggetaboutit /s
Other countries (Taiwan, NZ?) quarantine you for 14 days on arrival, and also test you...