Live data from Hacker News

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

nbcnews.com

491–500 of 919 posts

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

#491
post #232
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic. I'm not sure how you think how critical it is. I personally have never had this issue and do not mind at all to lay still for a whole year to try to reduce the risk of this happening.

> The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic. Unless all the people you love are over 80 (in which case the chance of them dying before Corona hit was not much less realistic than it is now) that sentance is just completely false. Why spread such fear and misinformation?

[deleted]

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

#492
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. Any reduction in travel is going to have a positive effect. The best situation is for people to reduce their exposure to other people and to stay at home. If they do need to be exposed to others, the best is for them to be exposed to the same set of people all the time, and not to different sets of people.

This seems not fully worked out. Assuming total travel is constrained, selectively limiting travel to particular areas concentrates travel in the remaining areas, which increases the average number of contacts between travelers, which violates your “reducing exposure to other people is best” rule of thumb. By your model, some reductions in travel ought to have a negative effect. Is that a fair corollary?

There’s no such thing as a fixed amount of travel, and constraining it on one way concentrates it in another. That makes no sense. Constraining travel will reduce travel, which will reduce interactions between people, which will reduce the spread of the virus. We know this empirically from previous outbreaks and countermeasures.

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

#493
post #421
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't control a disease, the default assumption is that it infects a substantial fraction of the whole human population. In almost all examples in human history, whenever a disease stopped, it was either because it burned through most of humanity, or because people decided to make it stop. They don't stop themselves.

That's a ridiculous assumption. You're pretending we live in the 1400s. We don't. You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

> You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

the US gov't has spent the last 1.5 months doing nothing to contain this at all. ending flights from europe isn't going to do anything to help if they aren't testing people and preventing spread inside the country

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning public gatherings is really something that should be done on the municipal level, maybe the state level. The federal government should not have the power to disrupt every day life from thousands of miles away.

Exactly. And blanket policies are almost always terrible. Local communities have different constraints and different environments. There's no reason to believe that Fargo, North Dakota should have to respond to this in the same way that New York City does.

A virus spreads just as easily in a crowded room in Fargo as it does in NYC.

China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong King all slowed the curve, and have rules governing their whole country.

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

#496
post #259
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the hospitals are overloaded.

This has not happened in Korea, Japan or Singapore, and all have been dealing with the virus for longer than Europe. At some point, this scary story is going to have to be adjusted to reflect reality.

It helps that they have a population which was all about wearing masks BEFORE this ever happened.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly helps, it’s easier to control, and has a smaller impact on most people’s lives so more easily accepted. It’s not the most effective but other factors have to be considered, including social unrest. It seems a sensible decision IMO

>it certainly helps, it’s easier to control, and has a smaller impact on most people’s lives it has quite a lot of significant costs, in particular on the airline industry and business travel which is smaller in number but pretty important. And given that community spread is going to be a far bigger issue this ban is nonsensical.

Seems like many companies are already curtailing or banning business travel (especially international), so this might not be too much of a change.

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

#498
Is there anywhere in the US where we are doing random testing of residents to determine what the real infection rate is here? From all I can see we're currently just adding up the number of people who have come in with symptoms and tested positive instead of getting a real handle on what percentage of the population is infected. The CDC website right now says that there are 938 total cases.[1] That's laughable. At this point I'd sooner believe 93,800 or 938,000 than 938. Oh wait: "Now that states are testing and reporting their own results, CDC’s numbers are not representative of all testing being done nationwide." OK, so nobody's keeping up with the totals? Is that what I'm reading?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html

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

#500
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a ridiculous assumption. You're pretending we live in the 1400s. We don't. You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

> You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case. the US gov't has spent the last 1.5 months doing nothing to contain this at all. ending flights from europe isn't going to do anything to help if they aren't testing people and preventing spread inside the country

It hasn't existed in the US for the last 1.5 months.

We are testing people, and we are doing quite a bit to prevent spread inside of the country and out.

Post reply on HN