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U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

nbcnews.com

121–130 of 919 posts

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#121
post #14
post #10

Wouldn't that make UK the next hotspot? People will travel to and from UK to get to USA. Unless UK restricts travel from the rest of Europe.

Not that this ban makes a lot of sense, but not including the UK makes even less sense, considering they've already reported 400 cases (compared to the ~1,200 in the U.S.) edit: to be fair, maybe the administration would've preferred to just ban travel from Italy. But I'm guessing it's not possible to restrict travel from just one member of the EU.

Also doesn't make considering that Heathrow is a major hub for Europeans to travel to Europe.

Only reasoning I can see is political - UK did Brexit. For limiting the spreading this seems like a weird exception.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#122
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because he can’t anticipate the repercussions doesn’t mean it wasn’t politically motivated

Do you really think some moron bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world? Have you stopped to think about how unlikely something like that is? You may not agree with his style (I don't) or his personality (hate it) but the guy has to be minimally intelligent to make it as far as he has. At the very least he knows how to work a crowd and spot opportunity.

I think you're confusing different kinds of intelligence.

Just to lower the temperature, I'll use a non-political example. My grandfather, long since departed, was a master salesman. He sold all sorts of stuff door to door, including the highly dubious Kirby vacuum cleaners, before ending up in real estate. He was an incredibly good manipulator of people, but he was a very bad planner. He once famously sold the same piece of property to two different people, just for the thrill of the sale. (My grandmother had to sort it all out after.)

Being good at manipulation and bad at planning were deeply related in him and some other scoundrels I've met. Why? Because if you don't care at all about facts or repercussions, you can devote 100% of your attention to telling other people what they want to hear, what they'll believe. And it works the other way, too. If you're very good at talking your way out of problems, you never need to learn things like being disciplined or facing facts.

So yes, it is perfectly possible that some goof bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world. My grandfather, thank goodness, was never very ambitious, so he had a pretty small blast radius. I shudder to think what harm he could have done if he had actually applied himself.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#123
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because he can’t anticipate the repercussions doesn’t mean it wasn’t politically motivated

Do you really think some moron bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world? Have you stopped to think about how unlikely something like that is? You may not agree with his style (I don't) or his personality (hate it) but the guy has to be minimally intelligent to make it as far as he has. At the very least he knows how to work a crowd and spot opportunity.

Elections are popularity contests. There are no qualification requirements for the job.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#124
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watched the broadcast live, yes it includes cargo shipments. Something tells me the markets are going to react badly to that one

yea I'm guessing the market will be all red again tomorrow.

Safe bet, it feel almost 3.75% after hours right after the announcement.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#125
post #80
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation in Europe will be much worse a month from now than it is today, unfortunately. I'd bet on this ban lasting closer to 90 days than 30.

I'm not sure where this level of panic is coming from. Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing and funding has become available. Quarantining an entire continent, and even worse than this badly doing it, seems to be an astonishing overreaction. The average age of death for coronavirus victims is 83. The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Ko…

Estimates have said that they expect 20%-60% of people to get it (originally [1] but updated according to [2]. Something like 10-15% of those people require hospitalization [2] and something like 0.5% - 4% of people die [4]. If we use the lower bounds on all those we are talking about 6.5 million Americans hospitalized and 327,000 dead. For the sake of comparison, that is almost half the number of Americans who have ever died of HIV/AIDS [5].

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-...

[2] - https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...

[3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans...

[4] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

[5] - https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-...

EDIT: I originally didn't post sources, so I backfilled those in and slightly tweaked the numbers to match.

EDIT 2: I adjusted the numbers again because as a reply points out one of my sources updated their estimates.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#127
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More or less doesn't matter. It's a classic case of "one person can ruin it for everyone", which is why in many countries there is strict enforcement rather than just recommendations.

It isn't a classic case of one person can ruin it for everyone. When I choose not to go to the bar, the guy at the bar that ignored the advice about not going out in public still doesn't infect me . So less dramatically: individuals can (and will!) reduce their exposure to infected people that make poor choices. Of course the more people that do the right thing the better, but it isn't a situation where the outcome i…

Unless you hermetically seal yourself from the outside world, you are still at risk. Yes that risk can be reduced, but as more and more people are affected, your own chances go up exponentially, no matter what measures you take.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#128

From the NYT article: "He [Trump] said he would instruct the Treasury Department to “defer tax payments without interest or penalties for certain individuals and businesses negatively impacted.” Why deferments for businesses? Don't they only pay tax on profits?

It’s an interest free loan without the hassle of doing much paperwork.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there are already dozens of coyotes inside the fence.

It's not even that. Can coyotes double in number every 5 days?

5 days? It’s closer to 2 or 3 in the US and some other countries.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#130

Regardless of the ability of people to travel to the UK or Canada and get here (which people have done for a long time with other nations we don't take kindly to) it's absolutely going to reduce the number of people who will travel across the pond. Which is the goal, reduce infection rates. My concern is how economies are going to respond to the US being cut off from Continental ports for a month, which as far as I c…

> Which is the goal, reduce infection rates.

There are tens of thousands of incubating cases in the United States already. How exactly is a few dozen sick passengers per day going to affect that at all? You'd have to literally be picking up and flying in planes full of active cases to even match what we have here already.

This is insanity. No one with any expertise at all recommended it. No one serious thinks this is a good idea. It's not going to do anything useful at all.

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