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

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

#171
post #58

I feel like there are some particular cultural attributes in the United States that make this useless at this point. The United States has a very individualistic attitude. Sure, we can pause travel from Europe, but the current administration is very anti-europe. Can we pause travel in the US? I strongly doubt that we can effectively given the strong anti-expertise attitudes as well. My guess is that the United States…

On the other hand, Americans have much larger and more comfortable homes than Europeans. Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies, which means less trips to the store. Very few people use public transportation regularly. Most people have private back yards. Many more meals are take-out or drive-thru. More Americans use e-commerce for shopping than Europeans. In Europe by contrast, much more of life revolves a…

> Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies

No they don't. No one in NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, ... have big garages to stockpile supplies and most of the US lives in those big cities with apartments without garages.

In the suburbs they do but that's a minority of the population.

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

#172
post #4

I see in some places it says this includes cargo / shipping. Is that true?

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

Honestly given how long a cargo ship takes from the EU to the USA and given that the crew of ships has basically no contact with the cargo crates this makes no sense at all...

The only think I can come up with is that this will allow Trump to show how bad it is that the USA is so much international dependent for certain goods and use that then to push through regulations to enforce more local production. But if it's really that it's quite crazy.

A normal travel ban on the other side will slow/reduce/eliminate cross infection between the EU and the USA which can be helpful to slow the spread. But then from all what I can tell it might be at a point where the slowing of the spread caused by EU/USA cross infection doesn't matter due to many more local sources of infection... Well we will see. At least during the ban he can't really put the blame of any increase onto the EU anymore as travel was cut.

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

#173
The payroll tax holiday idea is bonkers. The people most in need of help here are hourly or gig workers who are told to stay home from work or who get sick and can't work. Paying less taxes on nonexistent wages doesn't help. It seems like the administration is more interested in propping up the markets than actually addressing the health crisis and its human costs.

Also, eliminating copays on coronavirus treatment is nice, but it's hard not to notice the glaring omission of anything to help the 9% of Americans who are uninsured.

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

#174
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's security theater, just like airport security screening. The politicians need to be seen doing something.

Don't put this on "The Politicians". There is exactly one politician in the world that sees closing the borders as the solution to all their problems.

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

#176
post #58

I feel like there are some particular cultural attributes in the United States that make this useless at this point. The United States has a very individualistic attitude. Sure, we can pause travel from Europe, but the current administration is very anti-europe. Can we pause travel in the US? I strongly doubt that we can effectively given the strong anti-expertise attitudes as well. My guess is that the United States…

Only time will tell, but fairly aggressive measures are already being taken in California and Washington where the cases are only in the hundreds, and many other states are following close behind when they have few to no cases. One thing even many Americans don’t properly appreciate is the degree to which most things are actually run at the state and local level. So far the federal dysfunction has not stopped the sta…

fairly aggressive measures are already being taken in California and Washington

Such as??

I'm living California, outside a major city. I don't see anything.

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

#177
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FOR CLARITY - I'm not saying that there isn't a need to take measures to protect people. However, I do believe that a lot of inaccurate information is being presented. The public attention on this subject is enormous, making it a ripe topic for the media to profit from alarmist headlines. [0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers. [0] https://twit…

Fair enough. I will update my numbers. If you have other sources to show that any of my other numbers are off, I am open to adjusting them. I have a feeling the totals at the end will still be alarming.

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

#178
post #17

I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons, but it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count, which means this will have almost no effect. I actually think banning travel from China months ago was a good call, but by analogous reasoning, the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week.

>I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons

No, Ireland is also exempt. In other words, the US is banning travel from the Schengen Zone.

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

#179
post #138

Why is the U.K. not included? This is so weird; it's such a mess in the UK too.

Excluding the UK hints that this is, at least in part, politically motivated. In terms of risk the UK is no different to other European countries. We are certainly not immune to coronavirus, and there are currently no restrictions on travel between the UK and the continent.

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

#180
post #163
post #17

I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons, but it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count, which means this will have almost no effect. I actually think banning travel from China months ago was a good call, but by analogous reasoning, the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week.

> the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week. The US had active uncontained clusters, and was known to have them, two weeks ago. Once that's true, there's no way that mere travel numbers are going to move that needles significantly. Again: we banned travel from China and it was too late already . This does not work. And I'm horrified at the number of people on this site that don't see t…

Banning travel isn't a magic cure-all that guarantees zero cases, it just lowers the initial caseload. That's extremely important because exponential growth is extremely slow in the beginning -- it takes as long to go from 1 to 100 as 100 to 10,000. If banning travel reduces 100 starter cases to 1, you double the time you have.
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