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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

#671
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not spread disinformation: Italy banned direct flights from China pretty quickly too. It did not matter, because patient-0 in Europe was a German. It’s now accepted that the virus arrived by crossing the Alps in some sort of Euro-business trip, not directly from China.

So banning international travel could have at least stopped it from reaching Germany. I think you are making his point while arguing on a technicality. I see no conceivable way that the economic loss of tourism or "business trips" is worse than what is about to go down in Europe.

The infection in Germany happened mid-January, when the Chinese had not even fully admitted to the problem. Chances are it had already reached all continents by the time any travel ban was even considered.

Unless you can read minds, these things happen very quickly now that the world is a global village.

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

#672
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were just 2 cases detected at the gym down the street from me. I'm in a medium town of about 40k in upstate NY. Not podunk, but hardly bustling. I'm considering the USA fully seeded at this point.

I'm betting we've been seeded since even before Wuhan's quarantine started. My folks and I all got pretty thoroughly sick during a cruise in early January, and they're becoming increasingly convinced it was COVID (especially since my stepmom tested negative for any sort of flu, and this was well before there were reports of COVID outside of China so of course the doctors wouldn't think to test for it even if they hap…

14% of cases result in severe pneumonia. R0 is about 4. Average incubation time 6 days. Average time to death/severe illness from onset of symptoms 16 days. If your folks and you got COVID before the Wuhan quarantine you would know someone, likely several people, personally who is/are in the hospital right now with severe respiratory distress.

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

#673
post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't. Screening all arrivals is helpful, but just shutting down travel is going to end up creating a whole new class of problems.

Medical officers (and Italy) tell us that screening arrivals doesn't help.

I was thinking more for data gathering purposes and so on before the healthcare system collapses under the weight of exponential growth. But I take your point.

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

#674
post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important detail that was missed, it seems, is that this doesn't go into effect until midnight on Friday 03/13.

The president says that clearly in his address. However the stuff about cargo being included is really odd. As if he was freestyling rather than reading. Other than that; I fail to see the point of this. There is already community spread in the US and the UK. The ban seems arbitrary and politicized.

> As if he was freestyling rather than reading.

Or as if he had problems reading, which we know he likely has.

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

#675
India has suspended all casual travel (based on type of visa) to India from all countries.

One of the latest positive cases was an individual who traveled from USA. He might now have spread it to a cab driver, his family and now their circles (school, offices) have possible exposure. :/

Given that he is one of the people who was not tested in the USA, and he has to be isolated here now, how many people like him might be spreading it far and wide in the USA? :(

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

#676
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, where was your cruise and were there lots of mainland Chinese people on it? Sadly the symptoms for CoVid-19 are pretty common across a variety of diseases, so “flu-like but not flu” doesn’t necessarily point to this. At that time during the outbreak, it seems likely you would have needed to have people from Wuhan on-board.

> where was your cruise Los Angeles → Catalina Islands → Ensenada → Los Angeles > and were there lots of mainland Chinese people on it? I mean, I didn't exactly go around asking people "are you from China?", but based on the number of people who sounded like they were speaking Mandarin I'd tentatively answer "yes". > Sadly the symptoms for CoVid-19 are pretty common across a variety of diseases, so “flu-like but not…

Lots of people live in LA who haven't been to China in decades speak Chinese as a first language. The relevant question is whether there were many people on that cruise directly visiting directly from Wuhan/Hubei. LA-catalina-ensenada-LA? Doubt it. Not exactly the type of cruise someone flies thousands of miles for.

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

#677

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…

> Can anyone comment on supply chains that rely on Europe to source goods? You know all of the stuff that's made in China? The machines that make that stuff are made in Europe. Well, not literally the ones that make the stuff in China, but the ones that US companies would buy if they were trying to manufacture more stuff domestically to replace the stuff they can no longer buy from China.

I think yes, literally, European machinery exported to China.

It's a massive export sector for the EU (€127bn), and a chunk of that is to China, but the easily-available statistics lump machinery and vehicles, so I don't have a source.

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

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4h delay and the people who de-boarded the plane initially, are not re-boarding because they probably left the airport by now, not knowing they had wrong information. For those that live in the US and de-boarded because of this "missing detail", I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet.

> I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet. I'm guessing you didn't mean this to be a double negative? In other words: > I would be surprised if in a week or two they feel like they dodged a massive bullet but I suspect you meant the opposite?

This is known as “negative concord” and shows up often in colloquial English. While popularly associated with African American and Appalachian dialects, it actually occurs almost everywhere English is spoken. (E.g. Pink Floyd’s chorus, “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control”.)

Even in formal writing, double negatives are common using “nor”. Consider the sentence, “He is not satisfied at all with the recommendations of Mr. Trump, nor with those of Mrs. Clinton.” If you change “nor” to “or”, the meaning remains identical. This shows the negative “nor” reiterates rather inverts the prior negation. Note the “nor” version is no less formal or professional in tone because of its double negative.

Negative concord even has precedent in Shakespeare: “I never was, nor never will be” from Richard III.

Most would suggest avoiding negative concord in a formal writing (excepting “nor”), but colloquially it’s been part of the language for hundreds of years. In a conversational context, the line you quoted is standard English with or without the “don’t”.

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

#679
post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best I could find is this handy interactive map/graph from the CDC: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html No "massive uptick" yet, but there are quite a few every week, so it could be that it's still blending in with non-COVID pneumonia cases.

That's a really good dataset (with a really clunky visualization, but hey!) Indeed. There are typically above 3000 deaths/week due to Pneumonia and 200/week due to influenza at this time of year. We had a smallish spike in mid-late January, where for 3 consecutive weeks, deaths were above trend at nearly 4000 & 400 per week. If you assume a 1% mortality rate for COVID, and you assume all deaths are due to pneumonia,…

If you are in ICU with flu symptoms, they don't just shrug when the rapid influenza test comes back negative. There are reflex tests that can be run to confirm positive or negative.

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

#680

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 th…

I would think we be able to estimate fairly correctly. I assume pretty much everyone who dies from it would end up in a hospital and counted. And since we know the death rate, we know for every 1 death there were x who have it and will/have recovered.

There have already been missed deaths that were later attributed to Covid-19 in the US. Since the fatality profile of Covid-19 closely matches the fatality profile you expect anyway (people are more likely to die when they are old or have preconditions), it is actually a problem to get reliable death counts. Fatalities must have been tested, or tested retroactively, for correct attribution, and since the US currently isn't even close to doing proper testing of living patients, you can probably add two and two together by yourself.
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