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

nbcnews.com

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

#681
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't that require the notion that infection rates are higher in the excluded place? Given the US's incredible failure to test widely, I am not seeing why flights from Sweden or Ireland are any more dangerous than flights from Seattle at this point.

> I am not seeing why flights from Sweden or Ireland are any more dangerous than flights from Seattle at this point. I'd favor grounding most flights at this point. However, the reason to restrict people from eg Sweden or Ireland or anywhere, is because those people in Seattle are our people (legally, citizenship-wise), which are the ones we should be concerning ourselves with and attempting to control/restrict/obser…

You seem to be imagining some sort of net inward migration, but I don't see any evidence for that. I do agree that general travel restrictions make sense, but I again don't see why Europe in specific matters here.

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

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exponential growth doesn't seem like a problem, until it is. A primary concern is reducing peak load on medical services. https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

I tried modeling infection rates, number of infected, and total number recovered and dead. Couple of things stood out. 1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out. 2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0. 3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant perc…

You’re describing a typical SIR model (susceptible infected recovered) which can be solved analytically. You can see the dependence on all those points you mentioned above.

Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...

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

#683

Just de-boarded and re-boarded an aircraft going to Europe from NY because of this „small“ missing „detail“ in the initial announcement. 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. Ouch.

The people who went home just won the lottery ticket.

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

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried modeling infection rates, number of infected, and total number recovered and dead. Couple of things stood out. 1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out. 2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0. 3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant perc…

You’re describing a typical SIR model (susceptible infected recovered) which can be solved analytically. You can see the dependence on all those points you mentioned above. Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...

That's what I was trying to do. I thought it would be interesting to build one and play with it. The issue with it being a mean model vs a mixes contact model noted.

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

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ridiculous part of this whole travel ban 3.0 is that it is totally unnecessary. If the U.S. had proper testing infrastructure, we could test every single person arriving from abroad and make them wait the 4 hours required to get a read. S. Korea has that type of testing infrastructure. We invented the darn technology. There are no excuses for the deplorable, laughable, incompetent, disgraceful (I could go on) rol…

They don't have a serological test yet. The test uses RNA extraction. So, the testing all over the world is time consuming and testing kits are expensive. I don't think this is just a US problem.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51836898

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ridiculous part of this whole travel ban 3.0 is that it is totally unnecessary. If the U.S. had proper testing infrastructure, we could test every single person arriving from abroad and make them wait the 4 hours required to get a read. S. Korea has that type of testing infrastructure. We invented the darn technology. There are no excuses for the deplorable, laughable, incompetent, disgraceful (I could go on) rol…

They don't have a serological test yet. The test uses RNA extraction. So, the testing all over the world is time consuming and testing kits are expensive. I don't think this is just a US problem.

You are just wrong. RNA extraction is dead simple. The basic extraction technology dates to the 1980s. The extraction reagents are (or at least very much can be) very simple ad very cheap chemicals like trizol reagent.

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

#687

Trying hard not to be political. But POTUS speech seems to make things lot worse than better along anything. The efficacy of this travel ban is questionable (given all these exceptions such as one for UK. Can people coming from other parts just have a layover in UK and be get permission to enter the US?). But lets give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did so in good faith. It is what's not in the sp…

> What happens when businesses in Tourism and restaurants run out of their runway and have to layoff people? What happens to hourly workers who get sick?

Well they should have accounted for this! They should work hard to get through this, not expect handouts! /s

As sad as the outcome might be death-wise, I hope this pandemic ripping through the US makes us realize how broken our systems are and how instead of spending trillions on military we should be spending money on our collective wellbeing.

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

#688
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then we should be canceling all flights in the US (we should be). Only canceling flights to Europe is a tiny fraction of what's actually necessary here.

It’s a matter of timing. Europe has higher concentrations of the virus than the US. The chances that a plane from Europe contains an infected individual are getting quite high. When the concentrations in the US get higher it will start to make sense to constrain travel more over there. Right now the chances a domestic flight contains an infected individual is quite low, but that won’t always be the case. Bear in mind…

It's not clear the US does have fewer proportions of actual cases, just fewer tested ones.

Saying the virus cannot be stopped seems defeatist. China seems to have managed it locally, albeit with some very aggressive measures.

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

#689
post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect UK was left off because POTUS has resorts in Ireland and Scotland, and no where in Europe. There's nothing credible about UK being off the list while every surrounding country is on it.

The UK is an Island nation with entry controls - passports are required even from the EU and there is at least token screening at the airports and docks of people with fever or other virus symptoms. Not that it’s the same thing, but being an island (so no walking traffic) and having some screening in place means that the UK simply doesn’t have certain diseases (like rabies) that are at least somewhat common in Europe…

Note that technically the UK does not require passports for entry from the EU - identity cards are also fine.

Having travelled back to the UK from a Schengen country in the past few days, I can also confirm that there wasn’t so much as a poster in the airport, let alone any actual screening.

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

#690

Just de-boarded and re-boarded an aircraft going to Europe from NY because of this „small“ missing „detail“ in the initial announcement. 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. Ouch.

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

Which timezone?
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