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United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

nytimes.com

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Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#11

Post by Barrin92 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6
spookthesunset wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what evidence suggests that travel bans actually do anything to "slow the spread"?

Math? Any particular transmission event is chance of someone being infected X probability of transmission. Reduce the first term and the total number of infected individuals at a given time T is reduced (until any exponential growth swamps the terms). Point of saying "it's impossible to prevent" is that it's not possible to reduce the first term to 0.

>until any exponential growth swamps the terms

but isn't that almost immediately the case? Let's say you have only 50 people in the States who have the new variant before you notice it, with an r naught of 2-6 that most of these strains seem to have after a few days you're probably already way beyond the few falsely negatively tested people who come in by plane. (the US still requires tests right?)

Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#12

Post by adam_arthur »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #9
spookthesunset wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, even if it works (which is unlikely), what about the costs to society? Do the benefits outweigh those costs? There are other things in life to worry about than slowing the spread of exactly one illness... is it worth continuing to put those on the backburner? When does this end?

It might end when universal vaccination and other measures suppress COVID to occasional outbreaks that can be quickly put down. Otherwise it may never end. With widespread circulation, and selection pressure to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infection, escape variants may become the norm. Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel restrictions, and new vaccination. Pretending it is not happening i…

Vaccines do reduce the spread, but breakthrough infections are common. Even with 100% vaccination rate, we should expect new variants to continue to appear.

The only way for covid to "end" is to accept that it's endemic and change our mentality towards living with it.

Truthfully even if everybody on earth caught it simultaneously tomorrow, only a few percent would die, and society would not fundamentally change.

It may sound heartless, but that's the truth. 1-2% of US population dies every year as a baseline as it is.

Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#13

Post by vinay427 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

It's already been detected in Hong Kong, Israel, and Belgium. We're not banning travel from any of them.

That is accurate. What point are you trying to make? The case numbers of this variant in those countries or their neighbors are not comparable.

Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#15

Post by landemva »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #9
spookthesunset wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, even if it works (which is unlikely), what about the costs to society? Do the benefits outweigh those costs? There are other things in life to worry about than slowing the spread of exactly one illness... is it worth continuing to put those on the backburner? When does this end?

It might end when universal vaccination and other measures suppress COVID to occasional outbreaks that can be quickly put down. Otherwise it may never end. With widespread circulation, and selection pressure to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infection, escape variants may become the norm. Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel restrictions, and new vaccination. Pretending it is not happening i…

It is deer and cats. It mutates between species. This will end if people get tired of the constant fear-mongering.

Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#16

Post by spookthesunset »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #9
spookthesunset wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, even if it works (which is unlikely), what about the costs to society? Do the benefits outweigh those costs? There are other things in life to worry about than slowing the spread of exactly one illness... is it worth continuing to put those on the backburner? When does this end?

It might end when universal vaccination and other measures suppress COVID to occasional outbreaks that can be quickly put down. Otherwise it may never end. With widespread circulation, and selection pressure to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infection, escape variants may become the norm. Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel restrictions, and new vaccination. Pretending it is not happening i…

> Pretending it is not happening is not an option either, when basic medical services are not available due to overwhelmed healthcare systems.

Then maybe those hospitals should have increased capacity over the last 2 years? Expecting all of what you said because hospitals don’t have capacity is, well… morally and ethically wrong.

> Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel restrictions, and new vaccination.

Expecting society to keep doing this forever is madness. It ain’t happening. There is more to life than a myopic fixation on exactly one illness to the detriment of literally everything else. That is a fact that some people seem to be unable to digest.

This ends when enough people get tired of this and stop complying. The experts who keep telling us to be afraid will never say it is safe.

Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#17

Post by archsurface »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4
Aliabid94 wrote: post #2

Ridiculous response - travel bans are not effective (the strain is definitely already here) and punish countries for transparency.

The US has been pretty transparent on that, that the goal is not to prevent it from coming here (that's impossible), but to slow its spread here to give scientists more time to evaluate its impact.

The reasons are irrelevant - South Africa still ends up effectively "punished", and encourages reduced transparency, and delayed announcement. Personally, I don't care, but the mechanism is clear.

Re: United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7 other countries

#19

Post by newbie2020 »

jmpman wrote: post #18
newbie2020 wrote: post #8

Racist and xenophobic president

I’m assuming you’re commenting on how Trump would have been vilified, but the press won’t make the slightest objection to Biden’s plan?

Yeah, so why did my comment get flagged?
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