711–720 of 919 posts
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Which timezone?
I expect the natural answer is EDT (Washington DC time) but it's an extremely legitimate question in a country as big as the US and it should have been stated more clearly by the Dyslexic In Chief.
The official number of cases in the US as reported by Campbell is 1084, with 33 dead. This number roughly tallied with what I see on the CDC site (they report 938 cases, 28 dead) [2].
The major of Seattle estimates there around 1100 infections in this city (source: Campbell's video), a number which could grow to about 70.000 in 6 weeks (source: Campbell's video, most likely based on the spread in Wuhan)
Seattle has a population of around 750.000 people, i.e. 0.146% of the population carries the infection.
The total population of the USA is around 328 million. 95% of the USA land mass consists of rural area with a total population of around 60 million (~20%), the other 80% of the population lives in metropolitan areas (source: Wikipedia).
If the infection rate of Seattle is used as a guide for the infection rate for the entire metropolitan population in the USA there are about 390.000 infected people in the country at the moment. While it is unlikely that this infection rate goes for the entire metropolitan population it is not out of the question given the high mobility of people in the USA. Even if actual the infection rate is a tenth of that in Seattle there are still around 38.000 infected people in the country.
Who is being protected against whom by this travel ban?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzXQ6Bu9JVI
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html
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…
I'm not sure the average population density across the entire country is that relevant - it doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of population.
The US is actually rather an urban country - 82% live in urban areas which is more than Italy (75%):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
Edit: Also noticed that Australia is 86% and Canada 81%!
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I would've thought that the closer personal contact in Southern Europe (hugging/kissing for greetings) would spread it faster. But if you look at infection rates, most more Northern countries now look pretty similar to how it spread in Italy 1-2 weeks ago. So not sure if culture actually plays a role. I guess it's all down to the economy, business travel spread it a lot. that's why areas with strong economies seem to…
>that's why areas with strong economies seem to be affected more than others (at least in Spain, Italy and Germany) Are you saying Spain and Italy has strong economies?
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The Japanese response has actually been pretty lackluster and haphazard. I'm rather surprised rates there have not been exploding the way they did in Korea, Iran and Italy.
A colleague and myself were pondering this today. He mentioned the 'bow', and general cultural aversion to physical contact. I found that interesting and plausible to consider.
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> Can people coming from other parts just have a layover in UK and be get permission to enter the US? I believe anyone who's been to the Schengen Area in the past x days faces the ban. Excluding the UK and Ireland surely had political reasons (the UK now also has >400 cases) but it's hard to define Europe if you don't use either Schengen or EU (both of which the UK isn't a part of).
I wonder about British/Irish people. Passports for EU citizens aren't stamped anywhere in the EU. I live in Denmark. Would the USA know if I flew to the UK, then the USA? (I don't intend to do this.)
I would imagine they will have you fill in a recent travel form. And make it clear that you'll be in a lot of trouble if you don't answer truthfully.
One thing though; which airline will fly only american citizen back from europe? will they fill a plane with those customers only? I think my main concern is that most if not all major European airlines will cancel all flights, regardless if there are a couple of US citizen on the flights. Meaning it's probably still going to be somewhat problematic to get back (if not from London then of course)
I'm trying to find more information about this, as I'm a tourist visiting the US flying back on Sunday. Does anyone know how this will play out, will they keep flying FROM the US to Europe?
But fun aside, I think you are still fine. To my knowledge no flights from the US seem to be cancelled so far. If they really do cancel flights, you could try to use another route trough another EU country. But I think that is still unlikely to be required. That might change though, but probably not until Sunday.
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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
>Nearly 20,000 people are being tested every day for coronavirus in South Korea, more people per capita than anywhere else in the world.
>The whole process from test tube to test result is about five to six hours.
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…
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Not that your statement is not funny, but please do not turn hackernews into reddit
Allow me to rephrase then: while the overall population density of the US is low, we have some pretty large dense areas, including Southern California and the northeast megalopolis