Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

We do that in Australia too and its worked great. (Well, except for a notable quarantine breach 6 months ago due to mismanagement.)

The problem is all this is closing the fence after the horse has already bolted. The average person arriving into the united states is less likely to have covid than a resident. Currently 2.7% of the US population is infected with covid19, compared to 2.4% of people in the UK, 0.9% in Italy, 0.2% in Canada, and ~0% in Australia, NZ, Singapore, India, China, etc.

Almost all new infections in the US come from domestic transmission.

View on HN

it should be departures from the US that require quarantine (pre-departure), not arrivals!

Where did you get those numbers? I read this comment earlier today, quoted 2.7% to a friend later, then realized I didn’t know what the source was and dug up your comment again.

Current US population numbers are around 328 million, while active coronavirus cases in the US are at 9.1 million. Divide the two and you get 2.7%.

Yep. Citation & world details here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

0% in India seems like you must have mistyped, or something.

India's infection rates are not comparable to the island nations that have successfully contained the virus.

I was surprised too!

Google took me here[1], which says India is down to 210k active covid cases at the moment. For a country with a population of 1.366 billion, thats only 0.016% of the population currently infected.

Its possible India's covid testing isn't telling the whole story - but they've apparently done 178 million tests to date.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/

By comparison, Australia has done 12.1 million tests [1] for a population of 25.4 m people.

[1] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/coronavirus...

Yes; India is probably missing the occasional case here and there. But given their daily case numbers have been dropping quickly, they're probably finding most people who have covid.

If India's real number of active covid cases was 100x the official reported numbers, they still wouldn't have as many active cases per capita as the UK and USA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com