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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

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only vs. China, Iran and Italy. What are you on about? We have fewer deaths than far more countries than that (France and Spain for instance) and per capita we are doing even better. The US has fewer deaths than the following countries per capita: Italy, Iran, China, S. Korea, Spain, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Albania, Lebanon, Netherlands, Belgium, Panama, Ireland, Iraq, Bulgaria, Japan, Australia, UK Country…

>> Only vs. China, Iran and Italy. > What are you on about? We have fewer deaths than far more countries than that You edited out the second sentence. The full quote is: Only vs. China, Iran and Italy. We're within a factor of two (that is, about 5-6 days) of everyone else. which is accurate.

Again not even close, France for instance has a death rate 10x ours per capita, that's gonna take way more than 5-6 days.

The statement is inaccurate any way you slice it. Why use incomplete information when more is available?

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

#802
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with an exclusive contract, a nation such as the US should be able to quickly ramp production of all the test kits, masks, latex gloves, respirators, oxygen concentrators, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals that we need. Yet we can't. That's crazy and it has to change.

Oh we certainly can. "We" have decided not to, for now. One day we might find out the who/why/how of this decision. That will be an interesting day.

The who is pretty much everyone in government, egged on by the business community with the tacit approval or at least disinterest of the public. The when is constant over the past half century. The how is outsourcing much of our productive capability around the globe. The why is the race to the bottom for the cheapest production cost.

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

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

That sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I've never heard negative concord in this context. Most people would just accept it as getting confused about the number of negatives in a sentence - as indeed did the op. Not everything is simply informal grammar; real fleshy human beings do get confused when they try complicated sentences like double negatives.

> This sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I’ve never heard negative concord in this context.

You have a misplaced trust in your instincts. The following examples of this exact double-negative construction (“...wouldn’t be surprised if ... didn’t...”) are quoted from newspapers and BBC specials:

> But the seeds have been sown and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't try, once she's feeling more confident herself, to persuade him into the deep end.

> "I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see there are a couple of days with some good news and very, very positive market news," Houge said, noting potential days of 10 percent spikes.

> "I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't lose $157,000 in taxes," Van Tuinen said.

> It was late, and I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't leave some of his audience back down the road somewhere impaled on point number 10 or 11.

Here’s a quote of John F. Kennedy using this construction in a recorded interview:

> President Kennedy: That's what I think. I would have been impeached. I think they would have moved to impeach. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't move to impeach right after this election, on the grounds that I said … and didn't do it … and let … I mean, I'd be …

I Googled these examples in five seconds. You could have too, but instead you chose to lob insults and embarrass yourself.

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

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It IS happening in Italy, and it definitely happened in China. The difference is that Japan, South Korea and Singapore have much more powerful nationwide governments. This allowed them to put infection controls in place much earlier than we have in the USA. It remains to be seen where we top out, numbers-wise, vs. hospital capacity.

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.

The Japanese response was not so bad when viewed in hindsight.

In comparison, Korea's response was disastrously wrong. Their "Let's test everyone" policy sent lots of people into medical limbo ("We can’t let you go because you're COVID-19 positive ... but meanwhile we have particularly nothing to do for you because you're not that ill") and got their hospitals flooded with mild cases.

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

#805

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%!

You pretty much can't compare the definition of "city" or "urban area" in different countries, so that tells you nothing. I mean, Berlin has 3.7 million people in a city of 890 sq km. Melbourne has about 5 million people in a city of almost 10,000 km. They're incomparable, and so the urban population of Australia and Germany are incomparable. (You can play with the definitions as much as you like but you'll never be…

[deleted]

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

#806
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.

> is worse than what is about to go down in Europe.

It's going down in the US too! We're merely a few days behind. If we had no cases, or a few contained clusters, then this would be an arguably useful policy. We have multiple uncontained outbreaks already, and have yet to enact meaningful policies to contain them.

It's too late. All this ban does is try to shift blame.

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

#807
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.

We're not really hearing any reports of unexplained deaths that might be covid deaths, and the US is advanced enough to not miss deaths like that, so one thing that might put an upper bound on how behind we are. Then again, there's a delay while symptoms progress.

This already happened in Seattle [1]. Undetected COVID deaths are not "unexplained" because they look like flu deaths, so they're simply catalogued as being from the flu.

"In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...

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

#808
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also on message. America First. You stop coming here. You're the problem, I alone can protect you from the bad hombres/virus people... Don't look into yourself and see what can be fixed, always blame the other.

Part of that message isn't wrong. The virus didn't originate in the US.

Statistically, it did. The overwhelming (!) majority of COVID-19 cases in the US are domestically transmitted. Who cares where patient zero came from at this point? Banning travel is going to do nothing.

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

#809
post #701
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I said the strong parts of each country were most affected. Not saying economically strong countries more than weaker countries but stronger regions more than weaker regions.

For Italy it's the North, for Germany South & West, for Spain the regions around Barcelona & Madrid. In each case, they were hit hardest. I don't believe that this is coincidence. There are other factors, like wealth leading to more travel and general, as well as population density. But interconnection by economic activity looks to me like a major factor.

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

#810
post #702
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but it is in the nation's interest to get as many people tested as possible (assuming we can solve the pesky test kit shortage). If people aren't getting tested because they can't afford it, that hurts the country just as much as it could potentially hurt them.

It is also in the nations interest to have free healthcare for everyone, so why should this be handled differently?

Because this virus overloads every hospital where there is an epidemic.
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