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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

#501
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an effect, because traveling itself creates chances for exposure. Anyone traveling on an airplane or train in close quarters, or passing through an airport or transit facility, can pick up or pass on an infection. By your last analogy, the red balls would have paint rubbed off them in the exchanges.

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 the virus cannot be stopped, or contained at this point. All we can do is slow it down while also limiting the harm our countermeasures cause.

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

#502

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.

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.

For those that live in the US and de-boarded because of this "missing detail", I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet.

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

#503
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying people have big backyards, eat loads of tskeour and order stuff online, in Scandinavia? Have you ever lived in Scandinavia?

Lived in Sweden for the last 15 years. Yeah, people out of cities have big back yards (people in cities have none), most workers eat out every day for lunch, shopping online (except for food) is pretty much the default. Denmark's pretty much the same. Poke around https://www.hemnet.se/topplistor

I've lived in both, and you're missing how large the difference is. Not to mention you seem to be missing the point.

What the OP was saying is that americans don't eat out that much, is a very heavily home-oriented society - thats why the OP mentioned take out and delivery - not going out for lunch.

And yes people out of cities in nearly all countries have big backyards, but you are missing the people have big back yards in the US EVEN inside city limits. There are ofcourse the couple exceptions like NYC etc. but mostly even big cities have the weird suburban style houses even in the most expensive areas!

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

#504

Is there anywhere in the US where we are doing random testing of residents to determine what the real infection rate is here? From all I can see we're currently just adding up the number of people who have come in with symptoms and tested positive instead of getting a real handle on what percentage of the population is infected. The CDC website right now says that there are 938 total cases.[1] That's laughable. At th…

I would think we be able to estimate fairly correctly. I assume pretty much everyone who dies from it would end up in a hospital and counted. And since we know the death rate, we know for every 1 death there were x who have it and will/have recovered.

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

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't blame him, blame the incompetent people he hired?

You can hire a whole team of perfectly competent people and all it takes is one slip-up to ship the wrong version of a file. I have no love for the administration, but I find it frustrating that people are so eager to attribute every single error, regardless of impact, to one name. If you go back one administration and search 'Obama clarifies' on google, you find the same thing. Turns out that press machines involvin…

In a hypothetical world where our competent president and his competent staff made an occasional error, it would be reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt.

This is one of three or four errors just in this address alone. An address that may literally be the most important of his presidency. It wasn't just some George W. tripping over his words, he said literally the exact opposite of what the policy actually was and just kept rolling.

This is too important to be grading on a curve.

edit: To be clear I'm not suggesting he misread the teleprompter intentionally. I am saying that he and his administration have a level of incompetence and neglect that would result in jail time in many private industries.

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

#506

Is there anywhere in the US where we are doing random testing of residents to determine what the real infection rate is here? From all I can see we're currently just adding up the number of people who have come in with symptoms and tested positive instead of getting a real handle on what percentage of the population is infected. The CDC website right now says that there are 938 total cases.[1] That's laughable. At th…

Johns Hopkins is keeping up with the totals.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu

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

#507
post #58

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…

On the other hand, Americans have much larger and more comfortable homes than Europeans. Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies, which means less trips to the store. Very few people use public transportation regularly. Most people have private back yards. Many more meals are take-out or drive-thru. More Americans use e-commerce for shopping than Europeans. In Europe by contrast, much more of life revolves a…

> More Americans use e-commerce for shopping than Europeans.

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find a great single source but this says 9% of retail sales were ecommerce in Europe in 2018:

https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-in-europe/

and this says 8% in the US in 2018:

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/global-online-retail-spending...

If you treat North and South Europe separately, it looks like Northern Europe has most ecommerce, then the US, then Southern Europe.

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

#508
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically, yes, the states these days won't do anything until the federal government tells them to. It'll work out in a nationwide lockdown, but such obedience hurt us in february when the CDC had a monopoly on test kits and nowhere near enough capacity to supply the whole country. We seem to be making all the wrong decisions in this emergency.

Those are valid points. As to the test kits, I keep hearing conflicting info -- e.g. that there was a shortage of ingredients, too much FDA red tape, etc. There will plenty of root cause analysis in the future, but I think we have to reshore critical infrastructure and there is lots of red tape to cut in both CDC and FDA.

My personal theory is that someone in the executive branch wanted to secure an exclusive contract for a personal friend. Something similar happened in the first few months of the Kuwait oil fires, with certain american fire fighting firms being given exclusive contracts to fight the fires, despite lacking the technology and expertise to extinguish them.

But I'm just a cynical man. It could very well be something else and I'll be very interested to read about this emergency once it's all behind us.

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

#509
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation in Europe will be much worse a month from now than it is today, unfortunately. I'd bet on this ban lasting closer to 90 days than 30.

I suspect improvement when the weather warms. There is little community spreading in the summer countries of Africa and southern hemisphere.

It may, but improvement regarding weather is related to people staying inside and in very close contact with one another when its cold/winter, nothing to do with temperature killing the virus.

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

#510
post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more Americans in suburbs and rural area than in "small apartment urban" areas. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e... > About 46 million Americans live in the nation’s rural counties, 175 million in its suburbs and small metros and about 98 million in its urban core counties. > As a group, the population in rural counties grew 3% since 2000, less than their 8% growth in the 1990s.…

And hell, a decent portion of SF at least land-wise is covered in single-family homes and duplexes, many (most?) of which are decently spacious and have garages. Even in cities, Americans tend to have more space than equivalently-situated Europeans.

Most of NYC is probably covered in single family homes, not sure that's really relevant though.
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