I'd hazard a guess that it's because they don't want to completely kill off tourism, an industry which is hurting pretty bad because of covid (see TSA arrivals screened https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput)
No tourist would be interested in coming over to stay two weeks on their own dime locked in a hotel, only then to be able to do some actual traveling.
That being said, this obviously needs to be paired with a relief bill that helps those businesses survive.
It still feels awfully risky to travel at the moment.
It's as clear as it is for any other viral disease. For example, to my knowledge, nobody has ever done any kind of systematic study of whether or not infection with influenza protects you against asymptomatic reinfection with the same strain.
This is a level of paranoia that is unique to this particular virus.
This particular virus is >5x deadlier than seasonal flu, is significantly more contagious, and nobody has any pre-existing immunity.
Despite strong countermeasures, almost half a million people in the USA have died from the pandemic so far, and by the time we are through that number could potentially double.
It is the worst infectious disease threat since the 1918 flu (thankfully not quite as deadly as that one, given modern medical care).
Well, no, actually. This virus is roughly on par with the 1957 pandemic in terms of IFR and per-capita fatality rate:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi...
Regardless, as I said before, demanding that some kind of study be provided to prove that asymptomatic infection is prevented by natural immunity is so far beyond what we know about any other virus that it borders on the hysterical.
Evidence please? The person you're replying to actually posted a CDC link.
The 1957 flu had less than half the IFR of Covid. It infected a smaller percentage of the world population than Covid is likely to, despite much less significant public health countermeasures, and a tremendous increase in medical knowledge in the past half century. It was likely significantly less contagious.
Death estimates in the USA are in the 100k range, vs. Covid which has already killed more than 400k (if we count using a similar estimation method) and will likely kill at least 200k more before it is through. (US population has more than doubled in the mean time, but we are talking about at least 5–8x as many deaths.) The difference in hospitalization rate is dramatic.
If you want a summary or some numbers about the current pandemic, try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic
It is really tragic that the abject failures of the US federal response have made partisans so heavily invest themselves in the claim that Covid is no big deal and we shouldn't worry about it.
Covid scare-mongers using inaccurate and outright false data to cause panic, terror and so much confusion that the public is left to choose what to ignore and what to follow, are causing much more damage than covid deniers are. The fear of going to the hospital among people with other ailments come to mind. There was an article in Nature the other day on the 300% increase in stillbirths in UK due to lack of in-person pre natal care. Another delightful side effects of the extreme fear propaganda.
No one listened to the idiot deniers anyway. They never were the problem.
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13423.
The US CDC's best estimate of IFR as of a planning scenaario document from September was 0.5% for people aged 50–70, and 5.4% for people aged 70+. (This is not the best source available, but miscellaneous journal papers could be criticized as cherry-picked.) Adjusted population IFR varies from place to place, depending on the proportion of seniors, people with pre-existing health problems, access to medical care, etc., but nowhere in the US is it as low as 0.19%.
If you want a credible widely cited meta-analysis, try e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1 from December which calls Covid "far more dangerous than influenza", and estimates the IFR to be at least 5–10x higher.
> The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.
> As shown in Fig. 6, population IFR (computed across all ages) ranges from about 0.5% in Salt Lake City and Geneva to 1.5% in Australia and England and 2.7% in Italy.
> Supplementary Appendix O: [We estimate that during winter 2018–19] the population IFR for seasonal influenza was in the range of 0.04% to 0.08% – an order of magnitude smaller than the population IFR for COVID-19.
* * *
> increase in stillbirths in UK
The UK has royally screwed up most aspects of pandemic response. Just like Brexit and everything else the Tories have had their hands on in the past few years. You don't see the same problems in other wealthy island nations like New Zealand or Taiwan.
(With the notable exception that the UK has done a decent job sequencing a large collection of viral samples.)
https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
> Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%): the rate was 0.09% in locations with COVID-19 population mortality rates less than the global average (< 118 deaths/million), 0.20% in locations with 118–500 COVID-19 deaths/million people and 0.57% in locations with > 500 COVID-19 deaths/million people. In people < 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%.
But this is a meaningless debate. Your own preferred source makes it clear that the "average IFR" is heavily dependent on population demographics (i.e. in the very next sentence after the one you quoted:
> our results indicate that about 90% of the variation in population IFR across geographical locations reflects differences in the age composition of the population and the extent to which relatively vulnerable age groups were exposed to the virus
You're also completely misinterpreting Figure 6 from that paper. It is showing that their model of age-specific IFR correlates well with observed differences in reported IFRs. It is not claiming that those reported values are meaningful in the absolute -- in fact, all of the "reported" values seem to be higher than the model by a factor of ~2-4, and they're substantially higher than the numbers cited by the WHO bulletin.
(and yes, I know you don't like Ioannidis, but this is a metareview, not original research. Also, not liking someone doesn't make them wrong.)
And if you don't cherry-pick which country you cite...
Globally, the 1957 flu caused about 1M excess deaths:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747626/
Currently, Covid is attributed to ~2M deaths:
World population in 1957-58: about 2.9 billion people.
Current world population: 7.8 billion people.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
1957 flu mortality: 1,000,000 / 2,900,000,000 = 3 / 10,000
Covid-19 mortality: 2,000,000 / 7,800,000,000 = 2.6 / 10,000
...they're about the same. Mortality varies dramatically from country to country in both pandemics.
No, this is a disingenuous apples-to-oranges comparison. One is a post-epidemic estimate by independent epidemiologists, while the other is a confirmed-positive-death count subject to contemporaneous political pressure and institutional inability to confirm every Covid death.
The contemporaneous confirmed death numbers from any seasonal or pandemic flu are always many times lower than the final estimate, and decades ago it was probably at least an order of magnitude lower. The discrepancy won't be quite as dramatic with Covid today, because a tremendous effort has been made around the world to get Covid tests to hospitals. But it will still be a very significant undercount.
After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts. And the situation is broadly comparable in Europe. But many less developed countries have much less capacity for gathering and reporting accurate numbers, and only a tiny fraction of Covid deaths are being reported in many places.
...as well as almost certain over-counting due to extremely liberal criteria for "Covid deaths" (e.g. deaths within 30 days of a positive test, which is the standard in many areas.)
Point being: there's uncertainty on the "confirmed-positive death count" in both directions and you're assuming that it's a strict lower bound.
Just today, the WSJ published an excess-death study that put the number at 2.8M, worldwide (or 3.5/10,000):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-19-death-toll-is-even...
Higher than the JHU numbers, but still within reasonable statistical error of the 1957 pandemic estimates.
> After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts.
Well, now you're just making things up. Also, again: see the WSJ study above. Even if you count every excess death this year as Covid...it's about the same as the 1957 flu season.
So even for a country with just 10 millions of people you can still find enough people who had covid twice to interview - how we fucked up the second and third wave notwithstanding.
But for the US I think the main attractions are the big cities and the national parks. The former are not really tempting to go to atm and the latter you usually want to go in groups and they seem so vast that I don’t think it is that big of an opportunity to go there when there are few tourists. The only people I know that traveled in between continents in the last months did so for family reasons and it was a huge pain for everyone with multiple flight cancellations, chaos with ever changing immigration requirements that not even the officials can keep up with, self-isolation, etc.
I have accepted the fact that I'm unlikely to see my family or friends there for probably at least 3 maybe 5 years.
They will very unlikely be allowed to visit here (Australia), and if they are will probably need to spend 14 days in quarantine upon arrival. Right now I am not allowed to leave the country (without a special exemption, which sure as hell does not get granted "to visit my little sister and her family!")
Even if I got that exemption, I'd need to join the huge queue of people attempting to return to Australia with severely limited inbound international travel capacity (we were only allowing 4,000 returning citizens per week, with the current concern overt he UK strain that's been cut to 2,000 per week). There are news reports of people who've been trying and failing to get back to Australia for 6 months or more, with flights being cancelled - and confirmed tickets of flights being cancelled (reportedly for people with higher priced tickets to fly instead...)
I hope the vaccines work out. I fear that they may not - either being less effective that advertised, being less effective against mutated strains, or being thwarted by anti vaxxers.
My hotel was full as well in Palm Springs. The only thin open late and popping was the Indian casino. They did check temps and make sure people had masks, but otherwise it felt like Vegas on a normal busy weekend.
This was international arrivals at LAX August 11 (the worlds third busiest airport):
Depending on where they're coming from they'll have to do that on the way home, so they're not interested in coming anyway.
Noone I know is considering a US vacation since mid 2020.