1. The China travel ban started when China had very few COVID cases.
2. The China travel ban started when we already had untraceable domestic spread in the US.
3. The EU travel ban started when the EU had a lot of COVID cases.
If those three things happened (#1 and #3 happened without a doubt, jury's still out on #2, because our contact tracing has been crap), it's possible for both of the statements you are quoting to be true. There's literally no point in banning travel from China, if Paris has 10x the prevalence of COVID, and you haven't banned travel from it.
Considering that the first major outbreak in the US was caused by travelers from the EU, it seems pretty clear that banning travel form China, but not from Europe didn't do much to keep COVID out of the US.
Why were European travelers being treated preferentially to Chinese ones, for over a month? I see a lot of people insisting that the travel ban wasn't racist, but I've never seen anyone explain this conundrum.
>>>There's literally no point in banning travel from China, if Paris has 10x the prevalence of COVID, and you haven't banned travel from it.
Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?
If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]
>>>Considering that the first major outbreak in the US was caused by travelers from the EU
Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]
>>>Why were European travelers being treated preferentially to Chinese ones, for over a month?
Look at this map regarding the spread of SARS[4]. It reached the world fairly quickly. Yet we didn't implement a global travel shutdown. Travel bans were rather focused on Hong Kong and parts of China[5].
The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases. This would provide the maximum benefit (spread reduction) at the lowest overall cost to quality of life and economic activity. If they had taken sensible measures, as they did with Ebola and SARS, maybe they could have.
> Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?
This would be a meaningful response if it was a Wuhan travel ban. But it wasn't. It was a China travel ban.
Beijing, for instance, had ~300 total cases at the time the China travel ban was put in place. Paris, at the time that the EU travel ban was put in place had multiple thousands. The prevalence of COVID in the EU was more than an order of magnitude higher when the EU travel ban was put in place.
> If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]
Travel bans can work if you ban travel from places with a high case load. We didn't do that, though. We banned travel from places that we politically disliked, and didn't ban travel from places that we liked. Unsurprisingly, the virus didn't care about our political preferences...
> Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]
I live in WA. It was not a major[1] outbreak. New York was the first major outbreak, and very, very quickly overtook WA in case numbers.
> The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases.
By late-February, COVID was completely out of control in Europe. By that point, anyone who thought that the EU had the ability to 'control the spread from a small number of imported cases' was either blind, or crazy, or just woke up from a two-month-long coma. They were way past the point of having to deal with a 'small number of imported cases' - they were at the point where uncontrolled community spread was overwhelming national hospital systems, and national lockdowns were being instituted.
And through all this time, we were welcoming European travelers with open arms.
I understand all of your arguments, and all the disaster mitigation steps you outline make sense - but they were not applied consistently to the two regions. By every metric, China was doing better at the time of the travel ban from it. By every metric, we should have banned travel from Europe in mid-February. We didn't, because we like the EU.
[1] I mean, it was major, if the baseline is compared to zero. It was not major if compared to what NYC went through a week later. NYC went from having one Covid case on March 1st, to 1,000 deaths by March 31st. New York state had more COVID cases than any country in the world by April 10th. [2] Meanwhile, Washington went from one case in January 21st, to one death on Feb 29th, to 247 deaths by March 31st. [4]
[4] Was the Washington outbreak the first one? Yes. Did it become a major one? Yes, by mid-March. Was New York worse off by every metric at that point? Also yes. Was New York a complete disaster zone by mid-April? Also yes. It was seeing a thousand deaths a day.
Ok, I think that's all pretty fair. I would have preferred a China-style lockdown to be implemented no later than February. I think we're closer to agreeing than disagreeing, in that we both feel the severity of the US's response was inadequate. I'm fortunate enough to live in Japan so I'm watching the disaster in my home country from afar.
The travel ban to China in the US mostly came from FAs blatantly refusing to fly to China. Also, yet we got EU flight bans nearly instantaneously. (Go figure)
>>>Nothing stops people from China from flying to Europe and then the US.
What portion of the traveling population is willing to take trans-continental detours like that? Some controls are better than NO controls.
>>>Yes, it was racism. Yes, it was pointless.
Are you saying that strict controls on population movements originating from the source geographic region of a virus should never be implemented as an early step to containment?
>>>I'm saying that calling it the "Chinese flu" and combining it with Trump's nationalist rhetoric and other outright racist remarks is racism, yes.
That's moving the goalposts. We were discussing the government act of implementing travel restrictions, as a policy. Rather than debate whether that is sound policy, you've retorted with "well he also said racist stuff...which is racist". This is why we can't make progress. Rather than address individual implementations on their own merits, all too often people are now lumping everything originating from the same decision-maker together and discarding the whole package.
>>>And what is the point of stopping flights from China only? When there were global outbreaks?
There was no spontaneous, independent outbreak of COVID appearing contemporaneously in Italy or the UK. A complete international travel ban probably WOULD have been the best idea (along with 90 days of Wuhan-style internal lockdowns). Short of that, a ban on the source nation of (again, at that time) 100% of the fatal cases seems like an appropriate compromise to not completely collapse confidence in the steady trajectory of the US & global economy.
>>>"Obama did it too" is not an argument.
It establishes precedent. Both for the policy itself, and that the deafening lack of "Racism!" criticism as proof of the hypocrisy inherent in the accusers today.
It's context. You want to ignore the fact that Trump was blaming China as a whole for coronavirus?
It's racism to blame the coronavirus on Chinese people.
So you want to tell me you are surprised when people see racism by the racist guy who does and says racist things pretty much constantly?
I'm not going sit here and line by line debate you. I lived during it. I know what happened. It was a nonsense policy like basically the whole of the Trump administration's response. It was a complete joke. There was no federal response to the domestic crisis here. We had no supplies. We had no leadership.
It's just a funny thing to point to this as some shining example of Trump doing the right thing when ever other indicator is saying otherwise.
>>>You want to ignore the fact that Trump was blaming China as a whole for coronavirus?
I think it's valid to blame the CCP government for the pandemic going global. Especially when the CCP instituted a strict DOMESTIC travel lockdown without a matching INTERNATIONAL one. Why did they let people continue to fly internationally from Wuhan?
>>So you want to tell me you are surprised when people see racism by the racist guy who does and says racist things pretty much constantly?
I'm saying that people are so wrapped up in their emotional response to Trump the person that it is interfering with their ability to accept sensible government policies. Policy decisions which are not distinctive from previous responses to global pandemic risks over the past 20 years. I see it all the time in my own (black American) community.
>>>I'm not going sit here and line by line debate you.
You asked if I wanted to continue the debate. Every one of my posts links to policy implementations in living memory, with citations. Your posts have no references, and you've doubled down on arguing about racism rather than debate policy, before bowing out of the conversation? So...concession accepted? This is why we can't have nice things...like a functioning government.
>>>There was no federal response to the domestic crisis here. We had no supplies. We had no leadership.
The US has known for a decade that it was unprepared for a pandemic[1]. Lack of supplies cannot be dumped solely on the feet of the most recent shitty Commander-in-Chief, in a long line of turds holding the office. As for leadership, half of the country spent the previous 3 years undermining the Executive Branch's authority because Orange Man Bad, and then was surprised when the massive (yet understaffed of key leadership positions near the top) Federal bureaucracy wasn't able to coalesce and pivot on a dime to tackle an emergent crisis? And you are SURPRISED at this? I'm not.
"You can't ban travel from China, that's racist!" --> "You can't ban travel from China, it won't do anything anyway!"
Then the rest of the planet introduced travel bans, which are still in effect a year later -_-.