It's all about flattening the curve at this point.
You can do your best to identify those infected and have them self-quarantine, but if the gates are open and infected people are streaming into your country, you're not going to get far.
You’re describing the opposite of flattening the curve. Closing the gates now does nothing.
I do not mean to be patronizing, but this is literally life or death and the math is very simple.
Today there are k infected people. Tomorrow there will be kn people.
If n is unsustainable, any positive value for k is equivalent. Arbitrarily large changes to k today make an arbitrarily small contribution to the final doubling.
“Infected people streaming in” means k becomes k+c. How much does reducing c flatten the curve? How much does it increase the time span of the critical last few doublings?
It doesn’t. That’s only dependent on n.
Ok, we can’t “flatten” the curve, but we can move the peak, right? How much does reducing c move the peak?
Well, every day we prevent k additional people from entering buys us one day. Remember, tomorrow that’s kn. Act fast.
If we could, this week alone, prevent a quantity of infected Europeans equal to the infected population already within the US from entering, that buys us one single doubling period before the collapse of healthcare. Maybe a week if we got lucky.
I will guesstimate that that is not a realistic target in fact. The actual benefit scales proportionally.
And next week it’s the same work for half the benefit.
You're all over this thread with the same point: what makes you think that not letting new cases in (in this case, travel from hotspots) is somehow not improving the situation?
>the math is very simple
Yes it is. There are infected people in Europe. Stopping travel from Europe = less infected people in the US. Yes, there are already infected people in the US, but a travel ban will neither increase or reduce that number; it's irrelevant.
I agree on all points, but are restrictions on internal travel much different from restrictions on external travel? Seems to depend on the definition of the boundaries, and I think it’s hard to quantify the relative costs of external/internal travel restrictions. So I’m not sure what we lose by also restricting “external” travel other than another level of inconvenience.
For a country the size of the US? Yes, there is a MASSIVE difference between the two. The volume of movement by air between California and, say, Colorado is massively larger than that between California and China, and one of those places currently has a COVID-19 outbreak and one does not.
The distinction between the two for the sake of definitions is also very clear - whether the restrictions apply to travel that does not cross the borders of the United States. The currently-announced restrictions do not.
The question isn't of restricting external traffic in addition to internal traffic; we're only limiting external traffic. We probably need to be doing a bit of both, though with less draconian limitations on internal traffic to accommodate economic realities.
But doesn't that require the notion that infection rates are higher in the excluded place? Given the US's incredible failure to test widely, I am not seeing why flights from Sweden or Ireland are any more dangerous than flights from Seattle at this point.
Flights seem like fertile grounds for spread of the virus, so that may be reasonable. Obviously disruptive, but keeping people out of airports and planes should help flatten the curve to some extent
> I am not seeing why flights from Sweden or Ireland are any more dangerous than flights from Seattle at this point.
I'd favor grounding most flights at this point. However, the reason to restrict people from eg Sweden or Ireland or anywhere, is because those people in Seattle are our people (legally, citizenship-wise), which are the ones we should be concerning ourselves with and attempting to control/restrict/observe/test/treat. The US is about to enter mass quarantine, as numerous other countries are. It's better if people from other countries stay outside of the US / stay in their own countries.
And further, it's dramatically better to only have to deal with our own people as a vector, not foreign persons. It's obvious that the fewer people that are infected within the US, the better.
You seem to be imagining some sort of net inward migration, but I don't see any evidence for that. I do agree that general travel restrictions make sense, but I again don't see why Europe in specific matters here.
Ugh, USA is at the moment likely on level with Europe.
The idea that this will prevent "infected people streaming into USA" is uninformed.
This step limits transfer both ways, between two regions that both have similar level of infection spread.
It may help both sides contain the virus, but it won't limit the amount of infected people in the USA on its own.
Please, be careful about the language you use, the way you wrote the sentence promotes FUD.
It’s more precise to say you don’t know whether you have 1000 deaths yet, as you are not testing even dead people at the same rate as elsewhere. Washington state got “lucky” by having a pretty obvious cluster that could not be brushed under the carpet, but there are likely hundreds of other pneumonia-related deaths going on right now who might well be undiagnosed covid19.
The estimate of how many deaths might be undiagnosed might be speculation, but it has already happened in Seattle that COVID deaths were misattributed to seasonal flu. In both cases, the death and symptoms will look identical the difference being in the underlying virus causing the issues.
"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."
The US has failed to do any significant level of testing given its population, so it's understandable why many people are not confident in the official figures, especially when it becomes apparent infections have been running unchecked for weeks before testing started.
>In both cases, the death and symptoms will look identical the difference being in the underlying virus causing the issues.
As stated before that is absolutely false which is why those cases were caught. Will data be imperfect, yes, but that doesn't mean we should start throwing around Chinese propaganda.
You're also eliminating one potential source of infected people leaving the country before symptoms show. Assuming prevalence is equal in the US and Europe, you gain exactly nothing.
(Op already said as much. Your answer reminds me of my Grandmother: "I know God doesn't exist, but it can't hurt to go to church.")
> Assuming prevalence is equal in the US and Europe, you gain exactly nothing.
That assumption is wrong, the prevalence will not be equal. One will be better off, one will be worse off. There is no scenario where the prevalence is going to be identical across such massive populations with such dramatically different cultures, population densities and healthcare systems. The US and various European nations will not act the same, they will not quarantine the same, death rates will vary, and so on. In fact, it'll vary considerably just within Europe, as we're already seeing.
It's better to separate accordingly, for both sides.
You can do your best to identify those infected and have them self-quarantine, but if the gates are open and infected people are streaming into your country, you're not going to get far.