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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

#741

Post by othello »

arethuza wrote: post #713
burlesona wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"extremely low population density" 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%!

This is actually due to the inclusion of suburbs and exurbs in the “urban” category for US, Canada & Australia.

Half of the US population lives in the suburbs (see above posters). What we would recognize as a real urban environment only accounts for less than a third of the US population (98M people).

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

#742

Post by makomk »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #603
remarkEon wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing we're going to get a lot of these sentiments over the next couple weeks (months?), about how these restrictions are interfering with the comforts of modern life. Let it stand as a reminder of how good we have it, and how fragile things actually are. It's a pandemic. There's going to be some bumps.

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…

Testing every single person arriving from abroad wouldn't work. The test is not reliable for people still in the incubation phase, and with exponential spread being what it is there are going to be a lot of those. I don't think there's any country on the planet taking that approach; they're all either banning travel from affected countries or forcing a 14-day quarantine period on travellers from them. The American media seems to have oversold people on how powerful testing is for domestic political reasons.

Also, 4 hour turnaround testing is really hard and I don't know of anywhere other than South Korea has managed it. They basically have to process the tests on site after collecting samples to achieve that, which is no easy feat as it requires not only specialised equipment and trained staff but also a carefully set up positive pressure room to prevent sample contamination. Plus, one of the key things that makes South Korea's approach so effective is that people drive up, get a sample taken, then immediately drive home to avoid spreading the disease to anyone else rather than waiting around for results.

I haven't even seen any examples of countries with substantial travel from Europe that routinely test people who've been there recently and developed mild potential symptoms. South Korea probably could but I haven't seen any confirmation that they do; they mostly seem to be focused on contact tracing and the large local outbreak. The UK and Europe don't. Maybe China does? Again, the American media has been running stories making it sound like the fact the US isn't testing everyone with a cough and a sniffle puts them massively behind the rest of the world and confusing people about what the rest of the world is actually doing.

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

#743

Post by Karto »

MrQuincle wrote: post #638
klintcho wrote: post #626

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)

They might lose landing rights. That's often enough reason to keep flying, even with empty planes.

And that's what has been going on for a few days inside Europe now. Airlines flying empty or near empty planes to keep their slots. The European Commission was meant to make a move about that, I don't know if that's been done already or not.

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

#744

Post by autokad »

chx wrote: post #579
cavisne wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there will be flights, from the UK (which is why it was left off).

Which makes total sense since the UK is a haven from this pandemic... oh wait. Nope. It's spreading at bloody Heathrow itself: https://www.airport-technology.com/news/coronavirus-heathrow...

UK is currently 29th on total cases per million population (6.7). That's pretty far down the list.

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

#745

Post by arethuza »

othello wrote: post #741
arethuza wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"extremely low population density" 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%!

This is actually due to the inclusion of suburbs and exurbs in the “urban” category for US, Canada & Australia. Half of the US population lives in the suburbs (see above posters). What we would recognize as a real urban environment only accounts for less than a third of the US population (98M people).

Maybe its my UK bias - the distinction between urban and suburban doesn't seem to feature a lot in statistics here - things are often just usually "urban" (including suburbs) or "rural".

I did see a figure of about 55% of everyone in England and Wales living in suburbs - but I suspect our suburbs look pretty dense to someone from Houston or indeed Achiltibuie!

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

#746

Post by tremon »

needmoney04 wrote: post #735
forkexec wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mea culpa. Makes sense when someone can't distinguish between themselves, their business and a country, so it would never be UTC. That would be too convenient for other people.

Does anybody know for certain if friday midnight means friday 00:00 am or friday 11:59 pm? Basically, start of day friday or end of day?

Dutch media reports "night from Friday to Saturday", so it's the latter. But that still leaves the open question in which timezone the 11:59 is in (and whether that's a static timezone, or based on local time at departure/arrival), and whether the 11:59 refers to actual or planned time of departure/arrival.

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

#747

Post by squiggleblaz »

Symbiote wrote: post #641
dx034 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> 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?

This kind of question is a weird one to me. It's like "oh, marijuana prohibition hasn't worked so we should tax it and regulated it".

If you're breaking the law, there's sanctions. You may or may not get caught, and you may or may not be penalised, but that imperfection doesn't decide if it's valid or not. The jails in every country have murderers in them, but murder has been illegal since time immemorial. No-one proposes that we allow murder because with the prohibition we simply wind up with people in prison.

And there's a big difference between free movement of people versus a limited funnel of people. If it's still early enough, that could make the difference between something that is containable and something that is not, and it might make the difference between ICUs that can cope with the peak and being completely overwhelmed. (However, I think the horse has already bolted on this one.)

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

#748

Post by squiggleblaz »

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #706
dx034 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The details are unclear anyway. What about Schengen citizens living in the UK? I can imagine they'll generally let people in from UK and Ireland but question them about travel history and maybe proof of residence. Lying to a border agent gets you banned for life, that should be a decent deterrent. In the end, it's not like a terrorism threat where the ones trying hardest are the ones you need to catch. Here, keeping…

You realize that the U.S. has probably many more infectious areas than Europe?

I don't think the people who made this decision are on Hacker News.

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

#749

Post by LIV2 »

Symbiote wrote: post #641
dx034 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Since UK isn't in Shengen don't you need to show ID on entry? Surely they record who comes in

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

#750

Post by jonathanstrange »

autokad wrote: post #740
himalayan_yak wrote: post #604

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…

a lot of people who criticize the ban says its arbitrary, etc etc. go to the site below. you can also sort by total cases / 1m pop. US stopped travel to China while the EU did not, and you can see that in the numbers. Right now, the US has one of the lowest rates in the world: 4 per million. If you want to call Trump for a mistake, it was not banning travel from EU sooner, when they themselves didn't ban travel to Ch…

The US is not testing nearly as much as other countries. Two weeks ago it has tested With this amount of testing the numbers you're referring to are completely meaningless. The number of infections is artificially kept low by limiting testing. Hundreds of thousands could be infected, the disease is growing exponentially, and there could be thousands of hospitalizations soon. I'm going so far as to say that there will be thousands of hospitalizations in the US soon and the death toll will soon climb rapidly.

For comparison, Italy has tested 60,761 people as of March 9 [2], and Germany, for instance, has started randomized testing of the population as part of the yearly random influenza testing.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing-in-us.html [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

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