"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]
