That's an irony. USA is pretty much a fortress for as long as border security goes, and it had the best chance of any nation to avoid Covid impact by shutting itself off from the world using mechanisms of border security only.
Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
You would need more than just a pre-travel testing requirement. You would also have needed an arrival quarantine and post-arrival testing.
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.
In January, outside of China (possibly elsewhere in Asia) absolutely everything was business as usual. I was traveling in Europe for 3 weeks at the end of January/beginning of February and everything was 100% normal.
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 don't have exact date timelines, but I know the large company I work for decided that the US was a coronavirus hotspot somewhere around the end of February and the beginning of March and banned business travel to or within the US. It was only in mid-March that they shut down the offices themselves, a couple of days before state or local governments began locking down.
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 at a relatively smallish (maybe a few hundred people) tech event in Phoenix the first week in March. There had been some consideration to canceling but they went ahead. They were cleaning surfaces, doing elbow bumps instead of handshakes but no masks, distancing, etc.
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 Chinese were low key buying up as much medical supplies in Europe as they could get their hands on and flying them to China. This didn't raise any alarms.
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.
Australia has had these measures in place for a while now but quite a while after January and they work pretty well. I think one of the very effective tools Australia has is the ability to close borders with other states. In the US even if one state is doing pretty well, it doesn't matter because people from other states will come in and ruin it.
> You would need more than just a pre-travel testing requirement. You would also have needed an arrival quarantine and post-arrival testing.
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.
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 UK is and island and they didn't do it either. It's learned helplessness: the world has given up on the idea that it's possible to contain the virus.
"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.
> “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 don't really remember medical experts were saying in early 2020, but I would have supported banning specific countries if it was based on a framework that adjusted bans as the number of cases changed.
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.
When Trump banned China he put in all the press releases and announcement speeches that he also wanted to ban Mexico (0 known cases at the time). This easily led people to believe the whole thing was xenophobic.
Don't forget his earlier travel bans against primarily Muslim countries, excluding countries that he personally does business with. A history of xenophobic actions from Trump means that he reasonably lost the benefit of the doubt for later cases.
Only if implemented in an inconsistent fashion - where travel from some areas with high levels of COVID is permitted, while travel from other areas with much lower levels of COVID is not.
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.
> 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.
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".
Finland's not exactly a COVID-free paradise, but my point is that there is no good epidemiological reason for a travel ban that includes it, but excludes Russia.
Which leads me to believe that the current travel bans have been made based on arbitrary political, rather than science-backed epidemiological reasoning.
The first person would, most of the time, not bother making the drive, which would have the same mitigating effect on COVID transmission.
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.
President Trump has never shied away from xenophobia from the day he announced his candidacy [1] to today when he gave a speech in Alamo, Texas [2] What Trump has done is try to minimize public concerns about COVID-19. [3]
The relationship between border towns is very tight. You would ruin the entire southern economy if you banned cross-border travel entirely.
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.
San Ysidro is still the busiest border crossing in the world. It's nominally 'closed', but still open for trade. In normal times you don't need a full passport, either- just a passport card is fine, and realistically a CA driver's license will get you through without trouble. It kind of has to be that way- Tijuana and San Diego are far too closely tied together for much else.
Border closures don't have to be all or nothing. In Australia we closed borders between states but allowed work permits in some places and had fuzzy borders (people within 100km could cross) in others.
The US has two huge land borders that people regularly commute
and trade across (not to mention cross illegally).
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.
> The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
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.
The land border with Canada has been closed (at the Canadian government's request) since March. Only trade is allowed, no personal travel at all. So, no, I don't think it's impractical at all. Trump did complain a lot about us closing it, though.
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.
> Canada also instituted the negative test on arrival rule in the last week or so. The caterwauling from our airlines was just ridiculous.
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.
you can close land borders just as you can close air borders. the threat model is average joe unknowningly carrying the coronavirus on their vacation / business commute, not some special op team sneaking into the country.
> The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
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.
It was. A sensible policy would have restricted all entries — at the time Trump restricted entry from China, there was no credible reason to believe that it hadn’t spread elsewhere.
> Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
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."
Covid testing hasn't been, and still isn't, universally available. Mexico, to pick one neighboring country with a lot of cross-border traffic and cultural ties to the US, has done 97% fewer tests than the US has, for example.
> The only question is why this wasn't done as soon as travel was restarted
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!
testing capacity couldn’t support it. no use doing this when the results come a week later. if this was a requirement earlier everyone would have complained it was just theater and not helping
Maybe politicians should bite the bullet sometimes and do stuff that will not be immediately understood by every citizen.
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.
India has had this requirement for a long time now (more than 6 months IIRC). If you don't have the negative test, you need to quarantine at preselected hotels near the airport after arrival. Most international airports now also offer on arrival tests.
In most countries they just want a negative test from the origin country, so the country being visited doesn't have to spend a test for the tourist. But it's not bulletproof, if someone tests false negative and flies and infects a few others.
Other countries (Taiwan, NZ?) quarantine you for 14 days on arrival, and also test you...
NZ currently requires a negative test if you are coming from the UK or US as well as 14 day quarantine for arrivals from anywhere (with more tests). You can also only return if you are a NZ citizen or permanent resident or you get some kind of special dispensation (notable recipients of these include film crews and America's Cup sailors).
I’m certain we could have figured out something earlier. We spend several billion dollars annually on an organization with a singular mandate to do so.
This doesn't make any sense. Requiring a test on entry to country with full-fledged epidemia is like asking for an umbrella on entrance to the swimming pool.
I recall that the science deniers were the ones in favor of border restrictions. Besides, I don’t envy anybody whose position is so weak they must resort to finger pointing. A scientist would let the data speak.
It’s clear through this all that we’ve seen great power wielded. Regardless of who you support, I hope anybody reading this remembers that there are more important things than winning. The government has a monopoly on violence. It doesn’t need you that much. Our kids are the losers when we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other.
They based border restrictions on bigotry, not science. And the cost to wait and collect more of that data is time and corpses, so it's not so cut and dry.
This is at least 6-9 months too late.