Biden Admin Announces Travel Ban for South Africa and 7 Other Countries, Citing New Variant (politico.com) 258
The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to ban travel to the United States from South Africa and seven other countries, just hours after a new coronavirus variant was deemed a highly transmissible virus of concern. From a report: The travel restrictions will begin Monday, affecting South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi, according to a senior administration official. The administration's decision was in response to advice from Anthony Fauci, the president's chief medical adviser, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the official said. Roughly a dozen countries took similar action on Friday.
President Joe Biden, who is in Nantucket for the holiday, was briefed on the new variant Friday. He urged fully vaccinated Americans to get booster shots and the unvaccinated to get the "life-saving protection." Biden also addressed the global community in his statement, saying the new variant shows the pandemic won't end until vaccines are readily available around the world. He said the U.S. has donated more vaccines than every country combined, calling on others to match "America's speed and generosity."
President Joe Biden, who is in Nantucket for the holiday, was briefed on the new variant Friday. He urged fully vaccinated Americans to get booster shots and the unvaccinated to get the "life-saving protection." Biden also addressed the global community in his statement, saying the new variant shows the pandemic won't end until vaccines are readily available around the world. He said the U.S. has donated more vaccines than every country combined, calling on others to match "America's speed and generosity."
Won't work ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I said this when Trump banned flights from China, and I say it again now ...
It will not work ...
Travelers from afflicted countries, will just fly into some other intermediate country, and then from there to the USA.
I saw in dismay how the initial cases in Canada were first from China, then Iran, then Italy, then the USA, and the Caribbean. And the federal government in Canada was slow to respond, closing the barn door after the horses were out ...
Similarly, during Delta's initial days, there were flight bans on India, but people from there did just what I said: they flew to an intermediate country and ended up here. Now Delta is estimated to be 99% of infections.
What will work? A total ban on all foreign visitors, or a forced quarantine in government facilities. Neither of these options are acceptable in most advanced countries for various reasons. Australia and New Zealand were successful with this, but the USA has a supply chain running through Canada and Mexico, so none of these three countries (just like most of European countries) can realistically do either of those measures.
If this new variant proves to be faster spreading, or immune evading, then it will be the dominant variant in a few months in most countries.
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Travelers from afflicted countries, will just fly into some other intermediate country, and then from there to the USA.
I agree that this seems unlikely to work, especially long term. But I don't think it's quite as easy to circumvent a travel ban as you think.
Passports are issued by your country of origin. They not only inform officials where you're from, but they contain a record of where you've been. This should be trivial to check against.
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It should be like that, but I doubt if officials will do it that way.
As I said, here in Canada we had a ban on flights from India in April/May/June. Someone I know was on a flight from Egypt to Toronto, and it was full of people from India who just made it to Egypt as a transit destination.
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We have to hope that natural immunity is better than vaccines (not clear - the methodology in recent CDC study was badly flawed
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I said this when Trump banned flights from China, and I say it again now ...
It will not work ...
What will work? A total ban on all foreign visitors,
You're mistaken about three things. One is the effect of banning tourists from China. There were TONS of Chinese (PRC) tourists visiting the USA pre-Covid. I saw one number that said 1300 flights to the USA in Jan 2020 from China, with close to half a million passengers. Just cutting off the tourists, and only allowing in the people legally entitled to enter the USA cut the number of people traveling, drastically, although some people would have rushed home. And it doesn't matter how many countries someone
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Just having more mutations does not mean they infer any fitness advantage for the variant.
An example is that prior infection with the original 2003 SARS coronavirus makes the person basically immune to the present SARS-CoV-2 virus. This was studied by a bunch of labs (Rockefeller Institute is one of them, can't remember the other, perhaps LaJolla Immunity Institute), and confirmed.
Anecdotally, the uncle of a friend is a retired physician. He treated a SARS patient in 2003, and got infected and survived. His
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Don't confuse dominating in percentage terms in a country with a low incidence rate with dominating in absolute terms globally. If the incidence rate of other strains is low, it's easy to gain a percentage dominance.
That said, its rate of spread is still greatly concerning. I fear that this isn't just a "reduced neutralization" strain, but rather, a strain that's even more fit at attacking humans, like Delta was. I had hoped that all of the low-ha
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I am going by what happened here in Canada during Delta's spread.
Details in this comment [slashdot.org].
If the modus operandi remains the same, then there is no hope of curbing this.
On TV now, one minister said : "we are banning foreign nationals who have traveled through South Africa in the last 14 days". This means citizens will be let through, another loophole that Australia plugged when they imposed mandatory quarantine (no exceptions by citizenship/residence status). We do have a PCR requirement, but it has a 72 hour
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One positive side effect is that the panic and media coverage over this Omicron variant will convince some of those with hesitancy to finally go get the vaccine.
Probably not. The people not getting the vaccine are avoiding it for because they don't trust it's advocates, think $DIETY will protect them, think it contains nano-machines that will take over their minds, or other reasons that have nothing to do with how dangerous they think the current crop of COVID variants.
Unless this new variant turns out to be a LOT worse, ie, a 50+% fatality rate, it won't do anything to change most anti-vaccer's minds
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One positive side effect is that the panic and media coverage over this Omicron variant will convince some of those with hesitancy to finally go get the vaccine.
Probably not. The people not getting the vaccine are avoiding it for because they don't trust it's advocates, think $DIETY will protect them, think it contains nano-machines that will take over their minds, or other reasons that have nothing to do with how dangerous they think the current crop of COVID variants.
Unless this new variant turns out to be a LOT worse, ie, a 50+% fatality rate, it won't do anything to change most anti-vaccer's minds
I think you're correct about probably not, but I think you're quite wrong about vaccination choices not being widely connected to risk of variants, and that it's a lot more subtlety in the people's reasoning. I think there's a lot of people who are simply calculating the odds, such as the young&healthy deciding they'd rather tough it out through an illness and that a child won't even have symptoms. (anecdote - friend of the family's son tested positive, caused school mini crisis, but actually never had
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You know what, I thought that too. But it seems that South Africa does not lack vaccines.
They do have enough vaccines for all the population, but the problem is hesitancy.
We can blame the conspiracy theorists, and other anti-vaxx propagandists for this.
Source: Doctor from South Africa [youtube.com].
It's more widespread already (Score:5, Insightful)
Belgium have confirmed a case in a traveller returning from Egypt.
I called it this summer! (Score:5, Interesting)
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I said that people are freaking out about 50% vaccination rates in the US, when they should really be worried about 10% vaccination rates in countries with 20%+ HIV rates like Lesotho and Botswana. An HIV+ person unfortunately makes quite a good incubator for viruses to mutate in.
Damn straight, existing studies have shown the significantly immunocompromised are the primary drivers of variation in the sars2 virus but hey the west needs its boosters.. You can never be too safe.
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If you want to breed vaccine evasion, you want to spread viruses widely in places where vaccines are in use, but at too low of a protective level to achieve herd immunity. Vaccination and boosters are not just about individuals. They're about populations as a whole. Even if you had a person who you could guarantee would be asymptomatic and have no long-term consequences (which is also a major concern, not just acute illness), vaccinating them still reduces the reproduction number in the population, limiting
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Actually it's more nuanced... You have to vaccinate the one special unlucky person who is (typically asymptotically) brewing variants at the rate of 2-3/month. And then clear the virus from their system.
I guess you get a crack at that strategy through vaccinating a lot of immunocompromised people, but geographically it doesn't matter where they are, nor through what affliction they are compromised.
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Still, it's an important point that you also need to help clear immunocompromised carriers. This means something like REGN-COV2, molnupiravir or paxlovid.
Re: I called it this summer! (Score:2)
if it were not for mutation maybe the human race wouldnt even be here. Come and collect your Nobel Prize. I quit science. It's all done.
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And FYI, evolution of virulence is not a one-way street [nature.com].
Biden blasted Tump for not listening to Fauci (Score:4, Insightful)
Earlier today Fauci said:
"More scientific data is needed about the new coronavirus variant that’s roiling global markets before the U.S. can determine whether to halt flights from southern African countries, Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser said Friday."
Source:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
I thought the American people have been conditioned to listen to Fauci as the voice of God.
So who in the government overrode Fauci's commandment, and told him to pound sand?
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Beyond that, I don't see this as "completely contradictory." Fauci's quoted stance is a reasonable approach at this stage of the game: when asked, a scientific person should hold off of any extreme responses until they have enough to go on. It could well be that Fauci later got the information he was looking for, and suggested a travel ban. I wasn't privy to Biden's delib
Ineffective but Useful (Score:2)
Everyone knows that this ban won't stop the Omicron variant spread in the US. However, if it slows it down from taking hold by a week or two, that might give us some very critical time to gather data from foreign cases so that we respond better when it does hit. There's probably very little justification for keeping the ban for more than a few weeks, but we'll know it's pointless as soon as the new variant becomes widespread here.
Clean Air (Score:5, Interesting)
We need to set the engineers loose to ensure clean air for all public indoor spaces. This can be done through a combination of ventilation and filtration.
Cholera was stopped by cleaning the water we drink, We can stop Covid by cleaning the air we breathe.
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That's a hard sell to republican/conservative landlords of office buildings and other structures who would have to spend at least billions (collectively) of dollars to rework their ventilation systems.
The only way this could work is if this were significantly subsidized/encouraged by tax dollars to make these changes but, then again, we already have a far cheaper and available solution (mRNA vaccines) that people just won't take
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Even simple portable HEPA filters can help greatly, and they're not that expensive. You can also retrofit UV sterilizers that beam light across the ceiling (but not down at occupants) - they appear to be quite effective as well.
But doing nothing at least with new building ventilation standards is inexcusable. It's not just about COVID - it's about all airborne diseases, present and future - as well as dust, allergens, often even odours.
I could not agree with the GP more. At one point, the concept of preven
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We need to set the engineers loose to ensure clean air for all public indoor spaces. This can be done through a combination of ventilation and filtration.
Cholera was stopped by cleaning the water we drink, We can stop Covid by cleaning the air we breathe.
Unfortunately exhaled air doesn't get piped into an isolated reservoir before being rebreathed by someone else. Simply increasing general airflow and filtration is at most a partial mitigation measure and you're probably talking on order of $100/ft^2 of floor space and considerable time to install a different HVAC. It was worth considering at the start of the pandemic but now it is far cheaper and effective to simply vaccinate all the occupants. (And despite the scaremongering it is highly probable that vac
Ah yes, the generosity of the USA (Score:3)
REAL generosity would look more like suspending IP law surrounding these vaccines for a while, and sending skilled teams to countries to help them set up their own vaccine manufacturing facilities. Some countries would be closer than others, to be sure, I realize that mRNA vaccines aren't something you can whip up in a field camp with a dehydrated mix and some hot water. But the current structure is holding back vaccine production around the world, and it endangers us all.
We can't do anything about global warming because the effects SEEM too far removed from our lives (even while we watch the effects sweep through on a daily basis), but even with short-term blinders on, surely we can see how this would be a good idea for a while. Are we really so willing to prop up capitalist profit-machines while people die and create new variants for us to be worried about? Everyone that rails against big Pharma should be protesting THIS, not the insane notion that there are microchips in the vaccines.
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suspending IP laws is the worst way to do it, because it results in poor countries getting inferior/ineffective medicines. PEPFAR is a much more effective example, better to work with people to make the medicines inexpensive than fail, cause a humanitarian disaster in the process, oh and make an enemy of the people you need to make the next important medicine. Look it up.
Source: Dr Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA. But what does he know about these things, am I right?
Kill the messenger (Score:2)
Banning travelers from South Africa is akin to killing the messenger. SA actually does sequencing and actually found a dominant variant. The trick is with SARS-CoV-2 is that by the time a country thinks about banning flights, it's already too late--the variant is there. (or will be in a duration of time that is inconsequential).
horses running free (Score:3)
I'm beginning to laugh at how politicians the world over are always shutting the barn door in a panic quite a while after the horses have already escaped.
Lockdowns at the height of a wave, instead of when going into a wave. Travel bans when the variant has already been registered outside the region.
If this pandemic makes one thing clear then it is that our politicians - pretty much all of them - are not qualified for their jobs.
The result of decades of "managing party politics" and "looking good on TV" being the most important skills of a politician.
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Politicians largely aren't elected to office based on their skill and competence at governing.
2 weeks to flaten the curve they said 2 years ago (Score:2)
Anybody remember that?
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Also, if you were going to go out to eat, shop, or socialize; Chinatown was by far one of the safer neighborhoods to do it in, both in terms of case rate and total case count which were in the same range as the Presidio, Richmond, and Glen Park. The hardest hit districts by far, at the time, were the Bayview/Hunters Point, the TL, and Viz Valley. So Pelosiâ(TM)s âoego ahead and go to Chinatownâ advise was perfectly cromulent at the time. In the here-and-now, Chinatown is in about the middle o
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I'm confused, what part of the travel ban from China related to San Franciso's Chinatown?
Or can you provide a citation where Trump said to avoid "chinese" restaurants? I seemed to have missed that part of it.
I think there are a lot of people who don't seem to see the difference between China the country and Chinese the ethnicity. I don't doubt a lot of people were too dumb to realize that "Chinese" food served in "Chinatown" San Francisco by "Chinese" people wasn't actually brought by those people directly
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This. It's akin to the circular reasoning argument that the Bible is true because it says it's true.
There's countless examples of people proclaiming that Trump's travel ban was racist and xenophobic and wouldn't work.
Just search "trump travel ban racist" in your favorite search engine.
I wonder if anyone will call Biden racist for this one:
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-restarting-trumps-remain-mexico-204906352.html
The worst part of all this is that I'm no fan of Trump, but I have to call the bullshit double s
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Allow me to help you with that...
https://www.allsides.com/media... [allsides.com]
Re:two weeks to end covid for good (Score:5, Insightful)
What you are describing is essentially inoculation.
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Re:two weeks to end covid for good (Score:4, Informative)
And the other trouble is that using the vaccine is better.
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And the other trouble is that using the vaccine is better.
And faster. And cheaper. And proven to work. And is science based.
So obviously places such as Florida, Texas, Kansas, and South Dakota (to name a few places) will never do this.
Re:two weeks to end covid for good (Score:5, Informative)
Funny how Florida has such great success with covid
Florida 2847 deaths / 1m population
California (disaster central) 1882 deaths / 1m population
Vermont 651 deaths / 1m population
if this is success, I have great fear of your idea of mediocrity.
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Florida 2847 deaths / 1m population - 2847/1000000 = 0.28%
California 1882 deaths / 1m population = 0.19%
Vermont 651 deaths / 1m population = 0.07%
Peanutallergy.com - "Peanut allergies have affected 1.2% of the overall U.S. population."
If this is your idea of something worthy of shutting down borders over, I fear your response to an actual threat.
200 Die of Peanut Allergies Annually, 0.0001% (Score:2)
https://health.howstuffworks.c... [howstuffworks.com]
No comparison to COVID, off by 3 orders of magnitude.
It's going to be #3 on the list, assuming about 300K deaths. If you discounted by all the respiratory deaths, it would be #6. Here are the 2019 numbers:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta... [cdc.gov]
Re: 200 Die of Peanut Allergies Annually, 0.0001% (Score:2)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]
Total deaths per week in the US. I'm tired of people downplaying the numbers, if some new kind of car caused the weekly number of deaths nationwide to increase by 30%+, we would shut that down too.
Where are you getting the idea the numbers are small from?
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You go first.
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And if he already has been exposed to every known variant, with the possible exception of omicron? What is your next pithy quip? There are plenty of people who wore flimsy-and-ineffective cloth masks for 10+ hour shifts around thousands of other workers in factories, meat processing plants, warehouses, and other similar facilities all through 2020 and 2021. Many of them were unvaccinated the entire time.
Or he may just be some keyboard warrior hiding in a basement somewhere.
Nevertheless, "you first" is not
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The trouble is that a few months later when natural immunity wears off we'd be right back where we started...and possibly not finished dealing with the mountains of corpses generated by your plan. Remember how India was doing public cremations 24x7 to handle all their dead? I must assume you've forgotten already to suggest such a thing...well this would be much worse.
Re:two weeks to end covid for good (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's with me?
I'M WITH YOU! I did my part. Went and got a drug injected into me which makes my body create antibodies just like a real infection would except with a tiny fraction of the risk. I recommend it to everyone.
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Who's with me?
I'M WITH YOU! I did my part. Went and got a drug injected into me which makes my body create antibodies just like a real infection would except with a tiny fraction of the risk. I recommend it to everyone.
But the real question is, how is your 5G signal and have you found the government is able to more readily track you because of it?
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5G? Our government's not interested. While we were talking 5G, and enjoying LTE, Germany went ahead and introduced 3G on public transport [thelocal.de] and 2G [operawire.com] at events now
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My 5G signal got worse - I think it's a side effect of the magnetic superpowers that the vaccine gave me.
One of my favorite anti-vax nut jobs (Score:2)
I would have liked to have gotten the chance to tell the guy that he should do the same and take the drug that will help him transition into being vaccinated... But here's where the story stops being fun,
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Even if the mortality rate is only as low as 1% as numbers from Austria would suggest, where about 12 test per citizen were performed on average, or Denmark with 15 test per citizen on average and a fatality rate of 0.7%, that would lead to a lot of corpses within just 2 weeks in many places. The logistical problems created by this would burn into the next shit show.
What would lead ultimately to a better outcome I can't say. But the direct implications
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Immunization would be more effective and less deadly than "infect everyone" but we failed to provide vaccines to Africa so it should be no surprise that a new, more potent variant emerged.
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Point of note: while there's no guarantee that it actually emerged in South Africa, only that it's widespread there and not in any other country with significant monitoring - South Africa is not a vaccine inequality story. They switched from supply-limited to demand-limited in August. They've been vaccinating children for over a month. They're practically begging people to get vaccinated and have launched a big outreach programme to try to get people to. Anyone can get vaccinated, without an appointment, av
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Re: two weeks to end covid for good (Score:2)
I was waiting for this comment (Score:5, Informative)
I suppose it's possible the Trump administration wasn't racist, but instead was just staggeringly incompetent (whynotboth.gif). Neither of them are a good look.
Re:I was waiting for this comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Omicron has already been found in Belgium. It's "coming from Europe" sooner or later.
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There have been no local cases of B.1.1.529 in Europe. The Belgian case was on a returning traveler.
Travel bans, of course, don't keep a disease out unless you go for a hardcore quarantine system like New Zealand had, and even as we saw there, that can still leak if not done absolutely right. But what they can do is buy you a bit of time. The question is what you do with that time. If the answer is "sit around and pray it doesn't come", you're accomplishing nothing. But if it's "policies to boost vaccinat
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This, though it's worth noting that this travel ban doesn't apply to US citizens either, though you need to test negative before you can fly.
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No quarantine on arrival? Oh, no required quarantine, just a voluntary one the COVIDIOTS, who are the biggest risk anyway, will ignore [cdc.gov]. So I've been ripping into Trump for the past few years; also into my own country; finally a chance to reverse. Can I just take this chance to say Biden you idiot. F*** close your border properly. Yes, the president does have sufficient power to enforce quarantine by banning all flights into states which won't enforce quarantine. This is how you should be doing it [www.gov.uk]. Tot
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Hilariously though we know that Biden is being racist with this travel ban.
The new variant likely didn't originate in any of the countries the ban applies to. (Someone else pointed out that Fauci already said this, the Biden administration is just ignoring him. Or perhaps already forgot. Senility can be hard.) They just happened to still be sequencing enough cases that they detected it first. There are historical reasons for this, but they boil down to this not being the first pandemic Africa has had to con
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What about the part where Trump only banned the Chinese people from Wuhan, not US Citizens? It makes sense to ban travel from virus hotspots, it doesn't make sense to just ban some people
Re:I was waiting for this comment (Score:4, Informative)
Actually it makes a ton of sense. See, the executive branch is in control of granting visitors (using visas) entry into the USA. There's a fair amount of power to tell visitors, Well hey we are not completely sure about letting you in, lets talk about a few things (ie been to china, that sort of thing), or yah we're gonna have you wait until some other time to visit our country.
Not letting a US person (citizen, perm resident in) into the USA, on the other hand, are things which are generally known either as "arrest" or "deportation". That's a pretty hard thing to do (and good luck getting the ACLU or Nancy Pelosi to go along with Trump doing it to anyone) without really really good cause, at least for preventing people from entering. Note that a complete ban of passenger flights from somewhere wouldn't be the same, they're not denying entry because the people haven't actually come to a US port of entry in order to be denied, but of course imagine how total flight bans would have gone down as a first official action in Jan 2020. Also, ALL other countries have to reject that same country, otherwise the person can just fly somewhere else first, and spread the infection at the intermediate spot too.
Now of course there's the whole "dangerous illness" powers. However, remember #1 there was still a fair bit of uncertainty about people being contagious before they were sick, a way to easily tell someone was infected, nature of the disease, and all that. And #2, those powers are geared towards sick people. The government has the power to effectively arrest someone with a highly dangerous and contagious illness, but the travel restrictions around covid were, and in fact today are still geared towards prima facia healthy people. (ie, they want a covid infection test, not just does the person have symptoms of illness on the day of travel)
So the TLDR of it is that Trump basically didn't ban healthy US citizens from entering because he legally couldn't without a complete shutdown worldwide of ALL travel to or from China. He was just reducing the size of the problem to the people who probably all lived inside the USA.
As someone who was in one of the USA's Asian BFF countries at that time, I flew to San Francisco just days after the first travel restrictions. I was interrogated at the airport before the departing flight. They wanted to know if I'd been to China, been around people from China, that sort of thing. I wasn't standing in China and wasn't Chinese and had nothing Chinese in my passport or itinerary, but still they were very interested if I had been somewhere I could have been infected.
And when the travel restrictions went into place (just before the flight I've just mentioned), being the informed person that I am, my thought wasn't "Trump is such a xenophobe", it was "about effing time, I've been reading about this virus exploding for WEEKS". Later, I was waiting for travel restrictions from Italy, but things didn't work out quite the same way.
Honestly, I don't think anyone who was against Trump can truthfully say, "No of course there wouldn't have been open rebellion and talk of 25th amendment removal if Trump had instituted China restrictions mid January and Italy restrictions very early February. You know, 15 days to slow the spread or something like that". Nothing of checking the scientific basis for any restrictions. Lets get real, all the president's usual critics would have been talking about some kind of Russian blackmail angle or paranoid delusional germophobia or something. I have to say, a lot of the critiques about Trump administration's handling of the virus have not aged well when applied to sufficiently identical circumstances under the Biden administration. But this is politics, hypocrisy is generally baked in.
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A wall will not stop the coronavirus.
Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.
This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 13, 2020
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the problem with Trump's travel ban is that it a) only applied to China when we knew the virus was coming from Europe and b) we didn't actually stop travel from China, US citizens were still being let back in... without quarantine procedures. I suppose it's possible the Trump administration wasn't racist, but instead was just staggeringly incompetent (whynotboth.gif). Neither of them are a good look.
Yes, of course it's magically different when Biden does it, lol
(Or, perhaps neither is racist ... and both are/were just stumbling through. Nah ...)
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There were 6 other countries as well. I'm not going to look them up, but I believe 4 of them were in Africa and 2 others in Asia besides China.
And there weren't even known COVID cases in all of the African countries - maybe a few overall.
Re:I was waiting for this comment (Score:5, Informative)
We "knew" the virus was coming from Europe in Jan/Feb 2020? Liar.
More like February/March 2020 but basically yes. One of the major origin events of the COVID pandemic in the west happened in Ischgl in Austria in February 2020. The earliest known major super-spreader locations was the Kitzloch restaurant and bar in Ischgl which was closed down on the 9th of March 2020 after it was identified by a COVID tracing team in Iceland. That news can hardly have taken more than a few hours or so to reach the US by which time it should have been obvious to anybody in the US government from the Resolute desk on downward that this highly contagious virus was going to cross the Atlantic into the US.
Re: I was waiting for this comment (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I was waiting for this comment (Score:4, Insightful)
The right response would have been to shut down all travel. Nothing in. No imports. No exports. We have enough food. We have enough domestic supply. We should have just waited it out. Stayed open, and wall ourselves off. It would have spread in a few countries and then stopped. We could have slowly allowed travel from countries that had 0 infections for a few months.
I still remember the chaos at US airports at the start of the pandemic. That would not have worked unless you barred huge numbers of US citizens from entry or required them all to enter mandatory containment camps and judging by the shit-storm created by simple vaccine jabs that would have caused a shit-hurricane of biblical proportions.
Re:I was waiting for this comment (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't support Trump, but as usual rsilvergun is full of shit.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/g... [forbes.com]
This was prior to our being aware that it had spread to Europe. Biden said it was xenophobic, and the house Democrats were working on a bill to roll back all of Trump's travel bans:
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/22/... [vox.com]
We knew it was in Europe in late January (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that Trump's ban was announced on Jan 31st. There were articles about COVID in several places Europe before that.
I think the mistake you're making is conflating the articles that came later, which discussed in detail how the scientists traced the path of COVID out of China and into Europe (and which were floating around in May/June), with the initial articles that described the virus in Europe.
Again, Trump knew, or should have. There's no good looks for him here.
Re:We knew it was in Europe in late January (Score:5, Insightful)
You can confirm this yourself by doing a google search for "covid in Europe" and setting your date range to January 2020. Trump, being the president of the United States and having access to the full power of US intelligence would have known this... or should have known it. Remember that Trump's ban was announced on Jan 31st. There were articles about COVID in several places Europe before that. I think the mistake you're making is conflating the articles that came later, which discussed in detail how the scientists traced the path of COVID out of China and into Europe (and which were floating around in May/June), with the initial articles that described the virus in Europe. Again, Trump knew, or should have. There's no good looks for him here.
There are reports that Trump and his officials were warned of this virus way before the Kitzloch super spreader event. Trump should have announced the travel ban to Europe at the same time as the travel ban to China and enforced both strictly. That might have mitigated some of the damage. The Kitzloch incident and its aftermath is just that one indisputable and patently obvious event where the Trump Admin should, at the latest, have seen the writing on the wall. In stead they buried their head in the sand. Having said that I don't really think a strictly enforced travel ban to China/Europe would have done very much or that it could even have been pulled off. Even if you banned foreigners entry to the US there was no way to ban an entire tsunami of Americans from returning, and quarantining them all effectively would have been a logistical, and more importantly a political impossibility because ... FREEDOM!!! If you can't even convince half your country to wear a mask and wash their hands I don't think mass quarantining of hundreds of thousands of Americans citizens returning home would be on the agenda even if you could set up the quarantine facilities.
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Clearly it's only because he hates people from Africa! Or are we saying that when a president bans travel from a specific continent it's now prudent, and not a sign of bigotry?
Except the con artist never stopped anyone from China from coming into this country. Not one plane was ever stopped [washingtontimes.com].
Further, the con artist himself never mentioned he tried to impose a ban on Europeans from coming into the U.S. during the pandemic. He only went out of his way to specifically mention China even though Italy and Spain had soaring numbers of infections, as did Europe as a whole.
The question you should be asking, why didn't the con artist ever mention he was trying to impose a travel ban on Eur
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Everything has a motivation, a response, and a result. There are plenty of idiots in the world who don't know what they're doing, but end up doing the right things and get the desired results. Everyone knows a lucky idiot, blindly followi
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Apart from all of the things he's said for the prior 30 years in media.
If you're going to go far back, then Biden is a clear racist. Wilmington is still segregated today.
Re:What a Racist! (Score:5, Interesting)
* Won both the House and Senate, but with super slim margins and a highly partisan environment making major bills nearly impossible.
*We have enough supply to have vaccinated the entire country. Except half of the country believes that the virus is a weak flu and a strong bioweapon while doing absolutely nothing to protect themselves.
* We have a roaring stock market, but outside of upper income demographics that means nothing. The stock market is also doing well mostly because every knob the Federal Reserve has to help the economy is basically turned to max.
* Housing market is booming, but if you sell you're home you're doomed in a market that has no inventory and if things return to stable prices either the USD inflation just wiped out 25% of everyone's net worth or everyone who bought a home in the last few years is underwater for a decade.
* Wages are going up, but that's mostly because cost of living increases have pushed people out of entire industries critical to society.
Jerome Powell's nomination definitely doesn't help my view of him. The Federal Reserve has contributed more than a little to some of these issues and that's a spot he has some minimal control over with this nomination.
Re: What a Racist! (Score:2, Funny)
You can't blame Biden personally, he literally has no idea what actions/positions his handlers choose until they put it in the teleprompter.
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You can't blame Biden personally, he literally has no idea what actions/positions his handlers choose until they put it in the teleprompter.
End of quote.
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“Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor
and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good
genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton
School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if
you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if,
like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m
one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s
true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they
try—oh, do they d
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A wall will not stop the coronavirus.
Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.
This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet — and we need a plan to combat it.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 13, 2020
Re: What a Racist! (Score:2)
Whether he is a racist or prudent depends on the details of the ban. If anyone coming from that area, including US citizens are banned : then prudent. If only citizens of that country are banned, and especially if that country predominantly sends a certain race other than the dominant race in the US : then racist.
Here, SA might be sending lots of caucasian whites to the US. That factor also needs to be considered.
Re:What a Racist! (Score:5, Informative)
I think we're mostly just tired of covid now.
That's nice. Too bad COVID isn't tired of us.
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What I'm tired of is the lack of research based action. I still don't know to what degree fomites are a cause of COVID. There also is a lack of good mask research. Where is the info on the effect vaccinations have on this new variant - has S.A. not vaccinated anybody?
I can understand there being a lack of research at the beginning of the pandemic but at this point it just shows what a fucking useless bunch our leaders are, they're pathetic.
Re:When's the SMALLPOX variant coming out? (Score:5, Informative)
Gates isn't particularly worth listening to about anything.
That is, he has interesting ideas, but so do many Slashdotters.
I don't think it's an issue of having ideas; it's more of an issue of available information. Gates has been involved in global health issues for decades now, through his foundation. He has the resources to get lots of data not available to the vast majority of slashdotters, and he has the clout to meet and talk to lots of top people in the field all over the world. By contrast, many if not most slashdotters base their opinions on stuff they read online, or in some extreme cases on what they heard from a man in the pub.
The consequence is that Gates will be better informed than the average slashdotter and his opinions should be considered more carefully than the average Slashdot post.
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Gates could be better informed than the average slashdotter, but there are many slashdotters who have better ideas than him.
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It is when you allow travel for people who weren't Chinese, and didn't even bother to test or quarantine the Americans returning from those supposed banned countries.
Not that this is intended to justify any particular course of action but this is also
exactly what Biden is doing. His restrictions do not apply to US citizens either.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/s... [twitter.com]