U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days | Hacker News Reader

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

nbcnews.com

920 pointssahin866 comments

Regardless of the ability of people to travel to the UK or Canada and get here (which people have done for a long time with other nations we don't take kindly to) it's absolutely going to reduce the number of people who will travel across the pond. Which is the goal, reduce infection rates.

My concern is how economies are going to respond to the US being cut off from Continental ports for a month, which as far as I can tell hasn't happened since U boats were in open waters.

Can anyone comment on supply chains that rely on Europe to source goods? I know medical grade steel comes from over there, but I don't know what else.

Edit: apparently the president misspoke.

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.

The situation here will be much worse in 30 days, too.

I'm not sure where this level of panic is coming from.

Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing and funding has become available.

Quarantining an entire continent, and even worse than this badly doing it, seems to be an astonishing overreaction. The average age of death for coronavirus victims is 83. The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. Italy is especially vulnerable because it has the oldest population in Europe which is one of the factors that is leading to the 5% figure from there. It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse.

I recently watched a speech by a US mayor which essentially said that the panic over Corona is going to do much more damage to people than the actual virus and I tend to agree. Simple quarantining measures mixed with best practices for infection control until we have more information about the virus seems perfectly fine. Blowing up the global economy is complete overkill and is a typical move from an administration whose response to topics are either to ignore them or sledgehammer them.

Exponential growth doesn't seem like a problem, until it is. A primary concern is reducing peak load on medical services.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

This website doesn't contradict anything I've said and I cannot see the relevance to the point.

I tried modeling infection rates, number of infected, and total number recovered and dead. Couple of things stood out.

1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out.

2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0.

3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant percentage of the population sick at once.

Could be my model being shitty but it looks like at high r0 there is a momentum effect which drives the total number infected above what you would expect.

You’re describing a typical SIR model (susceptible infected recovered) which can be solved analytically. You can see the dependence on all those points you mentioned above.

Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...

That's what I was trying to do. I thought it would be interesting to build one and play with it. The issue with it being a mean model vs a mixes contact model noted.

Both of these models are well studied and compared in the literature

> The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. [...] It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse.

A few percent is a lot. World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.

Because World War 2 killed 3% of the general population.

The coronavirus, in a single country, has killed 5% of infected people and elder people or those with pre-existing conditions are majorly overrepresented in infection rates.

>World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.

This isn't just wrong. It's irresponsible for you to be saying these types of absolutely incorrect things.

The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic.

I'm not sure how you think how critical it is. I personally have never had this issue and do not mind at all to lay still for a whole year to try to reduce the risk of this happening.

> The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic.

Unless all the people you love are over 80 (in which case the chance of them dying before Corona hit was not much less realistic than it is now) that sentance is just completely false.

Why spread such fear and misinformation?

It’s not only over 80s. It’s anyone with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, morbid obesity, and some others, which collectively describes large swaths of the US population.

You have your math wrong.

Unless none of the people you love are over 70, that sentence is completely true.

My wife is a pre-kindergarten teacher and has asthma. I'm very worried.

I tell you a secret: if not traveling for a year means that even my grandfather with 91 lives a year longer, I'm on board.

Everything from smoking to high blood pressure to diabetes to old age to obsesity is considered a "pre-existing condition."

Yes, killing 5% of infected people is serious, especially when viruses of a similar family regularly infect 20% of the population, and the population has no inborn resistance to this partical virus, and it is, provisionially, more infectious than similar viruses.

Simple models suggest we'll have 500k deaths or so by 2021. Of course, it could be less than that, but it could also be more. It's almost certain we'll end up with some days with a 9/11 worth of deaths; it's just a question of whether that's a few days or for months on end.

No we're not. That's absolutely absurd to claim. It might -- MIGHT -- kill 2-3% of people who are highly susceptible to it, people who are in their 70s+, people with cardiac and respiratory disease. Maybe. We don't even know that will happen, because we can probably save a huge percentage of that population as well.

You're fearmongering, and it's bullshit.

You're... reverse fearmongering? Downplaying?

Additionally, for someone calling others' claims bullshit, your numbers have no correspondence to reality. In Wuhan, the 3% number was for the general population; for the 70+ age range, it was ~20%.

3% of the infected, not 3% of everyone. You can't compare it to WW2 unless you assume everyone will be infected.

If you don't control a disease, the default assumption is that it infects a substantial fraction of the whole human population.

In almost all examples in human history, whenever a disease stopped, it was either because it burned through most of humanity, or because people decided to make it stop. They don't stop themselves.

That's a ridiculous assumption.

You're pretending we live in the 1400s. We don't.

You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

> You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

the US gov't has spent the last 1.5 months doing nothing to contain this at all. ending flights from europe isn't going to do anything to help if they aren't testing people and preventing spread inside the country

It hasn't existed in the US for the last 1.5 months.

We are testing people, and we are doing quite a bit to prevent spread inside of the country and out.

first case was Jan 21st apparently[1]

[1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa-coronavirus/

This is false. Studies done in Wuhan show that people with CVD have well over a 10% mortality rate. In addition, COVID-19 has the potential to cause permanent disability if it does not kill you first.

I assume the first sentence in your comment describes the rest of it?

Europe or North America are not being quarantined off. And if people don't take measures, all healthcare is going to be overwhelmed.

There is a panic. Doesn't matter if its justified (its not, imho).

But it is real and it has the potential to seriously damage the economy.

A tanked economy will harm far more people than this virus.

If the ban gives sufficient reassurance to the chicken littles to induce them not to sell their stocks and invest in toilet paper, it will be a success.

So when the ICU's are all full, and more people are coming in and a space in the ICU is freed up - who gets the slot? A randomly chosen person? Triage? First come first served? Or someone who can pay extra for VIP access? Because one person will get that space, and the next ten people are going to die in the hallway before the next ICU space opens up.

The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity.

I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come.

The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops.

Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it.

Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.

Estimates have said that they expect 20%-60% of people to get it (originally [1] but updated according to [2]. Something like 10-15% of those people require hospitalization [2] and something like 0.5% - 4% of people die [4]. If we use the lower bounds on all those we are talking about 6.5 million Americans hospitalized and 327,000 dead. For the sake of comparison, that is almost half the number of Americans who have ever died of HIV/AIDS [5].

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-...

[2] - https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...

[3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans...

[4] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

[5] - https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-...

EDIT: I originally didn't post sources, so I backfilled those in and slightly tweaked the numbers to match.

EDIT 2: I adjusted the numbers again because as a reply points out one of my sources updated their estimates.

Jesus. That’s pretty terrifying!

FOR CLARITY - I'm not saying that there isn't a need to take measures to protect people.

However, I do believe that a lot of inaccurate information is being presented. The public attention on this subject is enormous, making it a ripe topic for the media to profit from alarmist headlines.

[0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers.

[0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...

He lowered it from 40-70% to 20-60%, hardly a qualitative change. The fact is that under essentially any epidemiological model, if you have R0 > 1 and no countermeasures, it's going to hit a sizable fraction of the world population, because the exponential growth only gets stopped by running out of victims.

Please read the entire source.

> Summary: Should have said 40-70% of adults in a situation without effective controls.

There's an enormous difference between 40-70% of everyone and 20-60% of adults - specifically if no countermeasures are deployed.

But the point of this thread is discussing why countermeasures are justified. I'm saying that you should expect a disaster if no countermeasures are deployed -- which is exactly what you're saying too.

The subject of this whole discussion is that there's a travel restriction being put in place. This is why I believe promoting numbers that were arrived at prematurely (I would argue unethically, with the intention of being 'first' in the news) and that specifically don't account for countermeasures to be a bad idea.

We should be trying to promote risk assessments that are situationally correct.

Fair enough. I will update my numbers. If you have other sources to show that any of my other numbers are off, I am open to adjusting them. I have a feeling the totals at the end will still be alarming.

But they don't literally expect 20-60% - that's if no mitigation happens.

Where do you see that because that didn't come from the article and video of the full interview that I linked in that original post?

I put the sources above. If you read through, you see that not only did the numbers change but also that he specifically made predictions based on a scenario where zero attempts to mitigate infection were taken.

I mentioned that here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552973

> [0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers.

> [0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2....

The first time I clicked on that twitter link it only showed two tweets and not that whole thread. The site was probably under unusually high load in the immediate wake of Trump's speech and the NBA news.

After reading the entire thread, he didn't say "zero attempts to mitigate infection". He said "without effective controls". He also said " Increasing evidence that the extremely intense control measures in China have reduced transmission while they are in force. As long as such intense control measures are in place it is possible to imagine keeping the number infected well below 40%. I don't believe most countries (maybe not even China) can keep such controls for months or a year, the minimum time frame for potentially having a vaccine. But even more moderate ones if effective could reduce incidence considerably". Not even Italy has gotten to the extreme measures that China was implementing. Also if you read his more recent tweets you will see that he thinks the European travel ban is futile.

Overall it sounds to me like that 20% number that I have been using since your first post is the updated number based off of our current mitigation strategy. I don't see any indication that he thinks that number is too high given the current path. Once again, I am completely open to learning otherwise if you have something that you can point to that clearly states otherwise.

There's no "they". That's one guy, making a paid appearance to the media.

We don't know enough about the virus to predict almost anything about it and are learning more every day.

I feel like people have already made up their mind about this by reading some extremely poor sources rather than bodies like the WHO so are going to panic no matter what people say.

The best option here would be for me to come back in a month and we'll reexamine the comment. 625,000 is literally insane.

That specific source is not the only one stating those numbers. Here is Angela Merkel saying as many as 70% [1]. Here is another doctor saying 40% [2] (sorry there is an autoplay video on this site).

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51835856

[2] - https://www.wbaltv.com/article/what-percent-of-people-in-the...

I can't believe the 40-70% number. Looking it up, this underscores just how horribly the internet is set up to have these kinds of conversations. If you backsource it, you discover he said "there's a chance" it will hit 40-70%, and then only if no countermeasures are taken. That's very different than what is represented in the cbs transcript.

I saw another seemingly reputable estimate today - some disease person on Joe Rogan's podcast, who was saying that 96 million people could get it, of which 48 million would need to be hospitalized. This makes no sense unless you are predicting a virus mutation. We're not even close to seeing 50% hospitalization rates.

> I can't believe the 40-70% number.

I can. Look at how seriously China shut down cities etc and it still spreads, though much slower. Do you think western nations will take the level of action China has at all or in anyhting similar to the same time frames?

And to be clear, when I say 'I can' I'm not claiming Im right or predicting anything, I really dont know. But this seems as likely as any other scenario especially when experts are saying levels around this.

I can't pretend to be an expert on this. All I can do is defer to experts, look at the numbers as they currently stand, and do some simplistic math. I also don't have the skills to vet the various experts, but I can tell you I have more faith in the vetting process of places like CBS News, BBC, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the German government than I do Joe Rogan.

Rogan was interviewing Michael Osterholm, who seems to be of good reputation.

Why can't you believe it? It will spread until so many are immune that it stops spreading. That requires it infect a good fraction of the population.

We don’t know whether you get immunity after recovery because the antibodies can be too weak. There are also already multiple strains and immunity to one strain wouldn’t guarantee immunity to the other strain.

Source: https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-warn-coronavirus-mo...

Death is not the only thing that coronavirus can do to you.

You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs.

I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know they happen.

> You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs.

Given that we've only been tracking the virus closely for 2 months, and we've only had a decent sample size of patients for only about 1 month, you really can't be making claims like this at this point.

Some survivors of SARS had significant long-term health complications. It remains to be seen if this will be the same.

I'm not making these claims. A senior doctor in Western Europe is making these claims[1].

> Fatality is the wrong yardstick. Catching the virus can mess up your life in many, many more ways than just straight-up killing you. "We are all young"—okay. "Even if we get the bug, we will survive"—fantastic. How about needing four months of physical therapy before you even feel human again. Or getting scar tissue in your lungs and having your activity level restricted for the rest of your life.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...

AFAIK besides spending weeks in therapy, other possibilities are not confirmed for COVID-19.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...

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

Tom hanks caught it in Australia. It's summer there now. Most of the southern hemisphere isn't developed, I don't think they're testing

It mostly spread through travel, a lot of it business travel. Little spread in less developed countries are likely because of less travel activity.

Improvement due to the seasons isn't simply due to the physiology of the virus itself. People spend less inside and in confined spaces where its easier to contaminate each other. Additionally, the flu does have significant seasonality, and flu season will be tapering off in the coming weeks and months, meaning more healthcare resources to dedicate to coronavirus infections.

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.

And with fewer pre-existing conditions. People that already have the flu or coughs for other reasons are more likely to need treatment. Late spring or summer usually has empty hospitals and fewer people experiencing a cold, helping with the treatment of Covid

I don't know about the actual economy but finance seems to hate this. Most open market indicators dropped by like 3%...

After dropping almost 5% today. Yikes.

The S&P futures dropped by 5% so far.

Oil and other commodities also took a dump.

https://m.investing.com/indices/indices-futures

https://m.investing.com/commodities/

Equities markets don't like it.

The last couple of weeks have been very profitable for "finance".

Uncertainty is the worst for financial markets. And we currently have extreme levels of uncertainty. Economically, it seems likely that we'll see a global recession in the first half of the year. Simply because many companies can't produce as much with travel restrictions in place. If governments step in to help this could recover quite quickly for the second half or latest next year. But no one knows how hard it will hit companies and how quick recovery will be. And until we get first indications, markets will continue to panic.

On the other hand, for long-term investors it doesn't seem like a terrible time to get into the market.

> Can anyone comment on supply chains that rely on Europe to source goods? I know medical grade steel comes from over there, but I don't know what else.

I don't see why commercial sea-shipping would be restricted.

Mariners may not be allowed to leave their ship while in port though.

Because the virus can spread on surfaces I think. As well as food, and organic matter.

China Post has been shipping stuff and spraying it with disinfectant. I don't see why that would be a problem. Also doesn't it take more than 9 days to sail across the atlantic ocean?

A lot of goods travel by air from China. See all Apple products (this is a guess, could be wrong)

You can sail across the Atlantic in 4-5 days on an ocean liner

Containers seem to take >=7 days from Germany's closest international port to Newark, NJ (practically NYC), last time I looked at routes and prices.

Oh, that's probably true. They're optimized for throughput rather than speed.

Ocean liners that carry passengers take 4-5

Actually, to a large extend it's fuel prices that cause these "low" speeds. Many cargo ships can be a lot faster if they have a reason that's worth the massive increase in fuel usage.

That also makes a ton of sense.

No. From the CDC:

> It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

> In general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from food products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient, refrigerated, or frozen temperatures.

Not sure the CDC is the most credible source at this point

>most credible source

Which would you say is the most credible source then?

This study [1] says it can last on surfaces for 2-3 days.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...

Which would be consistent with the risk being low for goods shipped from Europe or Asia to North America, right?

That's an un peer-reviewed pre-print.

That might be so, however there are enough names from enough reputable research centers to take it at face value. If we need to wait for printed peer-reviewed journal papers to combat an active pandemic then we might be waiting a while!

Not sure why I can’t reply to the commenter below. Anyway, here’s a link backing up the parent’s claim, contrary to whatever CDC is saying: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...

That study isn't saying anything contrary to what the CDC is saying. Or am I the parent that you're agreeing with, and you meant "regardless of whatever the CDC is saying?"

Maybe I misinterpreted what you meant. Your quote from the CDC said that the virus has poor survivability on surfaces, but the study I linked concluded it can survive for 2-3 days.

The relevant part of the CDC quote was "because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from food products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks" and the study preprint you linked showed that in the worst case (polypropylene surfaces) no live virus at all was detected after 72 hours while on cardboard it was more like a third of that time (with large error bars).

These are not mutually exclusive statements. It probably can survive for weeks in rare cases, but if it doesn't do that often it doesn't matter.

Any method of transmission that infects fewer than one additional person on average are effectively negligible on the overall exponential curve.

So yes, it is likely possible that symptomatic people can infect others, and it is likely possible that a contaminated doorknob can infect people for a week, but if these things happen rarely enough, it doesn't matter. The virus will die out if other routes of infection (e.g. the more typical person to person transmission) can also be made rare enough.

I see the point you're making from an epidemiological perspective but, because it's so important to people from an individual perspective to avoid contracting the virus, I have to take issue with your claim that it is likely possible to contract the virus from a surface after a period of a week or even weeks. I haven't seen evidence that would substantiate such a claim. According to that preprint linked above, even a period of one week on a steel door handle is more than six half-lives past the "death" of the last detectable viable COVID-19 virus. The science is not all in yet, and it may indeed turn out that COVID-19 is much hardier than we thought, but until then I don't see how you can say that it "probably can" survive for weeks in some cases.

I apologize if this is coming off as pedantic but the damage being done by misinformation and speculation about the coronavirus is significant, and I don't think it's possible to be too zealous about precision here. Trump's claims that fears were overblown and a "hoax" have been amplified into widespread and potentially deadly skepticism that coronavirus is even a danger. People have suggested various quack cures that at best drain the resources of vulnerable people. Even saying something as seemingly-innocuous as "wear a face mask to reduce your risk" ends up having a devastating impact on healthcare providers who really need the masks but can't source them. We should be listening to public health authorities and mainstream health experts, and taking reasonable precautions, but absolutely refraining from speculation that might have unforeseeable consequences.

Yes.

very low risk != no risk.

>but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

How does it spread then? Seems hard to believe all these people are being infected through hand shakes or being coughed on.

I'm just going to quote the CDC again, because public health authorities are really the best sources of information we have and I don't want to participate in the "telephone" effect that paraphrasing begets:

> The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person.

> * Between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet).

> * Through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

> These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...

As a non-expert on coughing dynamics, it seems incredible that one person can infect 50 others by this mechanism (reported New Rochelle transmission from one patient, confirmed by contact tracing and testing contacts).

At a carnival party in Germany with 350 guests, more than 40 were infected by a single guest. That gives an idea how well it spreads in enclosed spaces. You can assume there was somewhat close contact, but I've been to business meetings with also at least 5-10 people <6ft from me. That's how it can spread through a company within days.

I have not been to carnival parties for 20 odd years, but as I remember them (in NL/border with DE), everyone is drunk, hugging, kissing (often on the mouth with perfect strangers), vomiting, not washing hands after toilet (is there a toilet even??), falling over each other and also having sex. Maybe times have changed, but if it still is remotely like that I can definitely see someone infecting 40+ other people.

I mean, we have city parties here 'for all the family' which result in everyone touching each other (just as friends mostly of course but still touching hands, shoulders, neck, face, back), kissing (mostly on cheeks with strangers, but you mostly 'friendly' kiss everyone meet/talk/dance with and otherwise shake hands or even both) but all the other factors do apply as well; bad/no toilets, no soap/water, everyone drunk so who washes their hands anyway, vomiting and not being so careful with putting your sleeve in front of your face when you sneeze or cough... I only go during the day to such things if I go at all (when most people can still walk up straight) because it is rather disgusting after a while (I am old; I used to like that when I was young), but I can see a few people infecting basically everyone if they are popular/drunk enough.

Hmm... if this is true: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/12/coronavirus-...

How do we explain spreading from asymptomatic people? They're not sneezing.

Droplets from a sneeze can take hours to drop down.

And it’s the small droplets that float around the longest. These penetrate deep into your lungs and get stuck there.

Thanks, that's interesting and not something I've heard before. I think the CDC etc should make this clear : it isn't "an infected person sneezing near you" but "a volume of air into which someone has sneezed in the past few hours". If people knew this I think they would be more inclined to accept the distancing measures.

It gets mathematical and statistical really fast.

So there's a constant conflict between simple and easy to understand but not totally correct info, and scientifically correct but incomprehensible to most info.

Someone sneezing in your face = really bad. Someone sneezing an hour ago vs. touching something they just sneezed on... hard to say which is worse.

I get the statistical mechanics aspect, but surely saying "It can spread through the air in enclosed spaces up to <x> m and for <y> s" is understandable by anyone?

Today I read that it can survive for up to 3 days on some surfaces.

https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2020/...

The CDC themselves were involved in the study that says you're wrong.

If someone is able to find the source for this info I'd really appreciate it. Just spent like 10 minutes trying to find the paper they're citing but I can't find it and I don't have time to keep looking now. Maybe it isn't published?

It might be this one, actually. This one suggests it can live up to 72 hours on certain surfaces. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v...

I'd love to have some more data on this if anyone can provide.

standard procedure is to just have cargo sit in quarantine for 14 days or whatever. it's a lot less of a hassle than trying to quarantine people

Seems excessive for viruses. They live nowhere near that long outside their hosts.

Even a day is a long period of time in optimal conditions, and not many situations are close to optimal.

“An analysis of 22 earlier studies of similar coronaviruses, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) published online this month in the Journal of Hospital Infection, concluded that human coronaviruses can remain infectious on inanimate surfaces for up to nine days at room temperature.”

https://news.trust.org/item/20200228215640-n07fz

It's the "up to" bit that I take issue with.

It's a half-life thing. The larger your initial sample, the longer the sample can go and still have enough infectious ability left.

Scenario: Infected person sneezes over a large area and deposits over a wide area. Then you come by 6 hours later and touch a deposited surface and then 10 minutes later touch your eyes.

Each transition only picked up a fraction of what was left.

And each time period left only a fraction of what was there.

More important to limit travel, limit direct/close contact and clean commonly used surfaces frequently.

And better to avoid replicating the environmental conditions that created the "up to 9 day" figure: low temperatures and low humidity.

I don't see why commercial sea-shipping would be restricted.

Me either, but Trump did seem to say that. Vaguely. Stand by for "clarification".

He issued it by now (though the tweet reads as if written by someone else). I think it would've been a disaster banning cargo, with little benefit. Banning people could actually help to slow the spread of the virus. And ironically it could help Europe if they get infections better under control than the US.

Because the President said so during his address, which is why I commented. Apparently he misspoke when he said cargo would be included.

No - they said freight would continue unobstructed.

>Which is the goal, reduce infection rates.

Based on the localized infection cases I see across the US and have been watching as well as the characteristics of the virus (life outside host/on surfaces, in air, the degree of asymptomatic transference, etc.), it's well beyond containment IMHO.

Travel isn't going to do too much to reduce infection rates alone. We need significant cultural changes to reduce infection rates, but I don't see that happening for a variety of reasons. This country isn't about proactive action and is all about reactionary action though, so we're just waiting for that reactionary threshold. Some preventative measures have been pushed but they're no where near aggressive enough at this point.

It will be interesting how this is handled in our modern cultural, current political and work culture, etc. I suspect it's going to be fairly nasty but certainly hope not. I've been advising my parents to stock up and minimize any outside interactions for awhile.

There were just 2 cases detected at the gym down the street from me. I'm in a medium town of about 40k in upstate NY. Not podunk, but hardly bustling.

I'm considering the USA fully seeded at this point.

IMO the only reason we aren't reporting large numbers of new cases is because of the lack of widespread testing currently being done compared to other countries at this moment (other countries are performing magnitudes higher tests a day).

Even if you think you have it, there's still not enough test kits available yet - even if you're swabbed it can be days for a result(Saying this from west michigan).

yes, the case count is about to sky rocket because wide spread testing is coming online but hopefully the fatality count doesn't. I think the authorities need to do a better job communicating that a steep rise in cases detected doesn't mean a steep rise in severe or lethal cases.

I think a steep rise in infection counts due to increased testing/detection would be a great thing. More data is always better in these situations and more confirmed infections with confirmed recoveries would probably ease everyone's minds a bit more.

To be clear I'm not saying more infections are a good thing, simply that if there are a lot more cases that already exist, knowing they exist and having more accurate data that shows us COVID19 is less harmful than currently perceived/projected would be good for everyone.

you could start with getting the president and his sycophants to stop claiming its a partisan hoax and that it's going to go away in a few days

The president didn't say that the virus is a partisan hoax. His actions clearly indicate he doesn't believe it is a hoax.

The president did claim that some criticisms about his handling of the situation were a "new hoax" in the same way he has labeled previous unfounded criticism and accusations as hoaxes.

""When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."

so? That is not the same thing as saying it is a hoax. Plenty of reasonable criticisms to make but that doesn’t mean the President thinks the virus itself is a hoax. I am arguing for clear communication and facts and people are basically saying screw that let’s just spread rumors because, reasons. How is that helpful?

"His actions clearly indicate he doesn't believe it is a hoax."

Huh?

He called Fox News and said on air ""So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people [with COVID-19] that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better,""

His whole schtick until just about a few hours ago was that the risks were all hugely overblown.

I am also curious to know exactly which "previous unfounded criticisms" you are referring to.

I don't know if I'd call that blatantly partisan. Stupid, perhaps, or a hamfisted attempt to prevent panics and economic crashes, but it's not especially political.

"it's not especially political"

Yes. Yes it is. How many times has Trump tweeted about the stock market and how it proves he is a great president? Hundreds. Literally. His NEA chair has explicitly stated "I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today's stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president." His entire political argument for reelection is premised on his "business acumen." His down playing of coronavirus (to what end? why?) was a blatantly partisan attempt to gamble that this whole thing would blow over rather than risk spooking the markets.

Given the impacts that the stock market crash and his handling of the virus crisis are likely to have on the election, it is definitely a political matter. Realistically any time a president comments on anything it is a political matter.

And because people with mild symptoms aren't likely going to the doctor. They can't afford to take off work and go, and if it's simply mild right now, why risk their livelihood? I kinda hope this whole thing is a wake-up call for why our system is so unsustainable.

People on reddit (take that as you will) have been reporting that even if the symptoms are significant and match the profile, tests aren't being run if no travel has taken place recently. These people get turned away.

It matches this article on restrictive testing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavir...

COVID-19 doesn't mean there aren't regular flu / colds going around, too.

Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.

> COVID-19 doesn't mean there aren't regular flu / colds going around, too.

Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested. One of the most important things we need to do right now is detect the people who got the virus through community transmission.

> Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.

I'd say that testing those people should be lower priority, since an assumption they're infected is more likely to be accurate, so they can take preventative measures without needing a test.

> Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested.

This. I'm in my twenties so it's very possible for me to get COVID and only experience cold like symptoms (or less!). I'm sorry to everyone, but I won't self-quarantine myself for 14 days just because I have a stuffy nose (it's likely a cold right?). I'm fortunate enough to have the ability to take time off/work remote - but what if it's a cold this week and COVID in two weeks? I can't take a month off.

I'm from West Michigan - ATM there's very little testing available, and I'd only be tested if I had recently traveled. But we're past the point where recently traveling is such a big indicator - we're seeing plenty of community transmission for me to believe it's very likely everywhere already, and any lack of cases is because of a lack of testing.

This is a twice-in-a-century event. (Consider AIDS the other pandemic.) Our system should not be built for outlier events. Instead, we should make exceptions for those outlier events. (For example, we could have salary supports for those in quarantine and unable to work remotely equal to their average reported income over the last 12 weeks || a minimum wage and support for landlords or mortgages until the pandemic ends.)

Overpay for an extreme case rather than adapt your system around it.

Now, I have other complaints about our system and how it is unsustainable, but this is a poor argument as to why.

> Even if you think you have it, there's still not enough test kits available yet

The messaging on this has been pathetic. The other day UW in Seattle announced they had a capacity to test 1,000/day. Not adequate for the nation, but for the PNW, sure.

I'm in Seattle. While there may be official "kits" for this, the protocol can be run in any competent lab set up for this type of assay. DNA primers specific for covid-19 would need to be ordered, but this is routine.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/rt-pcr-detecti...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/rt-pcr-panel-p...

ETA: I'm having trouble locating positive control template sequences.

I am happy for S. Korea running 100,000+ tests, and embarrassed that the US has maybe run 1000s at this point. I also think that the virus is widely dispersed in the US and the best we can hope for is to keep the case load at a level manageable by our health care system. I'm pretty worried about that though.

That is not an adequate number for the PNW. Full stop. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Also it is entirely dependent upon if they get tested too. In the US, most people are wasting their time.

Does this mean we need a more robust domestic response to contain coronavirus, instead of or in addition to restricting travel to the US?

Akin to how securing a network is more than setting up a firewall at the perimeter.

It cannot be contained. That’s what the pandemic declaration means (even though the WHO should have done this weeks ago).

At this point, the only rational thing to do is to try to slow the spread. The good news is that this is a very mild virus, and the vast majority of infected people will have minor symptoms. The fatality rate in Korea is currently 0.6%, and becuase of the comprehensive nature of their testing, this should be considered the upper bound on CFR.

South Korea has been at 0.8% the last two days, and will continue to climb as their open cases resolve one way or another. Plus, didn't they just have a spike in Seoul?

There was a spike in Seoul. Based on their reaction so far, I have a great deal of confidence in their ability to isolate it and react effectively.

Regarding the rise in CFR: it will naturally go up as cases decline, because fatalities stem from a time when the case rate was more rapidly increasing. Korea’s case rate had been declining for several days:

https://mobile.twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/12297080012...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/heal...

Until the hospitals are overloaded.

This has not happened in Korea, Japan or Singapore, and all have been dealing with the virus for longer than Europe.

At some point, this scary story is going to have to be adjusted to reflect reality.

Sure, but I feel like Italy’s preparedness posture is closer to the US and they did get overwhelmed.

It IS happening in Italy, and it definitely happened in China. The difference is that Japan, South Korea and Singapore have much more powerful nationwide governments. This allowed them to put infection controls in place much earlier than we have in the USA. It remains to be seen where we top out, numbers-wise, vs. hospital capacity.

Here in Washington Governor Inslee declared a State of Emergency, which gives him the power to, among other things, mobilize the National Guard and State militias to establish field hospitals. This is essentially the same reaction China had with regard to building temporary hospitals, but at the state level instead of the federal level. We don't need federal powers, just competent state leadership.

My Bellevue daycare told me today that they probably won’t close unless a worker, kid, or family member gets the virus or...the state shuts them down. Fun times.

Even if they won't close, you can still pull your kid out when you believe it's prudent to do so, right?

Isn't that missing the point? That might be fine and dandy for him, but it bodes poorly for slowing the spread in general.

I’m ok with their precautions. Not only are they keeping things super clean, but they are giving my kid more hygiene education and training then I could possibly do on my own. For example, washing hands at home is a bit of a struggle because the sink is so high, it is much easier to drill in the habit at daycare, not to mention the peer pressure they apply by making a game out of it for all the kids at once. Child psychology is working for us in this case as long as it remains safe.

> washing hands at home is a bit of a struggle because the sink is so high

Buy a stool for crying out loud, they're like $10

We have one of course. Helps, but still isn’t a replacement for having a sink specifically at a 3 year old’s height.

The Japanese response has actually been pretty lackluster and haphazard. I'm rather surprised rates there have not been exploding the way they did in Korea, Iran and Italy.

A colleague and myself were pondering this today. He mentioned the 'bow', and general cultural aversion to physical contact. I found that interesting and plausible to consider.

And wearing a mask when you have the sniffles was already very common in Japan.

The Japanese response was not so bad when viewed in hindsight.

In comparison, Korea's response was disastrously wrong. Their "Let's test everyone" policy sent lots of people into medical limbo ("We can’t let you go because you're COVID-19 positive ... but meanwhile we have particularly nothing to do for you because you're not that ill") and got their hospitals flooded with mild cases.

Singapore did a top job containing it but it's a small country, one airport..., countries like the US or Italy on the other hand will have a different outcome.

Asia has way more experience dealing with these outbreaks than the west though. Think MERS

It helps that they have a population which was all about wearing masks BEFORE this ever happened.

You realize mild means “didn’t require hospitalization”, right? Many “mild” cases are taking weeks to recover.

Well, first: no. The vast majority of cases are no worse than a head cold.

But more importantly, you’re not dying and not clogging up a hospital. That’s what’s relevant to this discussion.

But that's not true. While lethality is estimated at tops 3.6%, the cases requiring hospitalization, including breathing apparatus, etc are quite high, and it WILL overflood the capacity of hospitals in virtually every country that didn't take really really serious precautions, of which there are only a handful.

It will be a big problem both in Europe and in the US, because they are starting to take measures only now.

What part of what I said isn’t true?

The vast majority of cases are mild, like a head cold. This is a fact, and has been reported around the world.

You’re arguing about relative hospitalization rates, but that has nothing to do with the discussion here. Mild cases aren’t clogging up ICU wards at all, because they’re quite mild.

It cannot be contained. That’s what the pandemic declaration means

That's the exact opposite of what the WHO said when they made the pandemic declarations:

"We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough: all countries can still change the course of this pandemic," reads a statement from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO.[1]

South Korea has shown this to be correct.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/11/corona...

It is not the exact opposite in any way. Your quote does not support your assertion. The truth is that it cannot be contained. It can be slowed down though.

"the upper bound on CFR"

I think you mean that this should be considered the goal upper bound on CFR. It's really the lower bound on CFR if you do everything right. If you do everything wrong, like the US is heading towards, you get overloaded health systems, critical shortages, and a 12% CFR or higher.

A 12% CFR is overstating it, but also because we won't be counting the heart attacks that weren't treated, the chemo and radiation therapy that was postponed, and the other health effects.

I think the true measure will be the year over year total mortality.

If our health systems are not overwhelmed, sure definitely 12% is overstating it. If they are, look out!

> 12% CFR is overstating it

If we overload our hospitals then CFR will go towards the number of cases that require hospitalization. Which is around 20%. Italy is currently far over hospital capacity and has a CFR today of 8% and rising.

> this is a very mild virus

Media and government keep making this claim, yet where are the recovery numbers of people? It drags on for weeks and weeks with no end in sight, correct? And current case fatality rate in Italy is 8%, was 7% this morning, was 6% yesterday - because they do not have hospital resources for the number of serious cases they have.

Serious, critical, and dead outcomes are said to be over 20% of case. This being described as "very low, a very small number" by certain people. That is not a low number at all.

"Does this mean we need a more robust domestic response to contain coronavirus, instead of or in addition to restricting travel to the US?"

YES! Restricting US<=>EU travel is just about the least useful thing we need to be doing right now.

We're not really hearing any reports of unexplained deaths that might be covid deaths, and the US is advanced enough to not miss deaths like that, so one thing that might put an upper bound on how behind we are. Then again, there's a delay while symptoms progress.

Awkward, the CDC announced re attributed deaths today

This already happened in Seattle [1]. Undetected COVID deaths are not "unexplained" because they look like flu deaths, so they're simply catalogued as being from the flu.

"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." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...

I'm betting we've been seeded since even before Wuhan's quarantine started. My folks and I all got pretty thoroughly sick during a cruise in early January, and they're becoming increasingly convinced it was COVID (especially since my stepmom tested negative for any sort of flu, and this was well before there were reports of COVID outside of China so of course the doctors wouldn't think to test for it even if they happened to have a test kit); it's increasingly difficult for me to be skeptical of that conclusion.

Thankfully all of us seemed to get over it without much complication, and it doesn't seem like very many of the people we've since interacted with have come down with it. We might very well have just been lucky, though.

I dunno, where was your cruise and were there lots of mainland Chinese people on it? Sadly the symptoms for CoVid-19 are pretty common across a variety of diseases, so “flu-like but not flu” doesn’t necessarily point to this. At that time during the outbreak, it seems likely you would have needed to have people from Wuhan on-board.

> where was your cruise

Los Angeles → Catalina Islands → Ensenada → Los Angeles

> and were there lots of mainland Chinese people on it?

I mean, I didn't exactly go around asking people "are you from China?", but based on the number of people who sounded like they were speaking Mandarin I'd tentatively answer "yes".

> Sadly the symptoms for CoVid-19 are pretty common across a variety of diseases, so “flu-like but not flu” doesn’t necessarily point to this.

Indeed, which is why I'm still at least somewhat skeptical. Still, it's hard to rule it out, especially given the relatively-severe symptoms (not the absolute worst I've felt, but it was pretty bad).

Lots of people live in LA who haven't been to China in decades speak Chinese as a first language. The relevant question is whether there were many people on that cruise directly visiting directly from Wuhan/Hubei. LA-catalina-ensenada-LA? Doubt it. Not exactly the type of cruise someone flies thousands of miles for.

True. Like I said, it ain't like I was going around asking people if they're from Wuhan, lol

That said, you'd be surprised what draws tourists from mainland China; Las Vegas and Reno (for example) both get plenty of Chinese tourists looking specifically to gamble, and I'd imagine the ship's onboard casino to have a similar appeal. Plus, there were plenty of other tourists from long distances, too, both from within the US (East Coast) and from Europe and Australia (from what I gathered from the people whom I did talk to). So evidently there were at least some non-Chinese tourists flying thousands of miles for it; seems reasonable that some mainland Chinese tourists might, too.

Small sample size but: similar experience here (in the middle of the USA). One of my son's friend's mother was even hospitalized for "pneumonia" for a few days. This was the first time I heard of a fairly young fit person having pneumonia due to the flu.

A couple of people I know at work (in Canada) had pneumonia in December (I think). Sometimes pneumonia is pneumonia. I assume even more had it and I just don't know. Neither of them had traveled anywhere recently.

It seems very likely that many people (especially in areas with lots of travel to/from China) who had "a bad flu" followed by a chest infection in January or early February actually had COVID.

We are unlikely to ever find out, because we won't have a reason to give everyone antibody tests

We would have had a massive uptick in pneumonia related deaths if this was the case. If anyone has stats on that they would be an interesting look.

Best I could find is this handy interactive map/graph from the CDC: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html

No "massive uptick" yet, but there are quite a few every week, so it could be that it's still blending in with non-COVID pneumonia cases.

That's a really good dataset (with a really clunky visualization, but hey!)

Indeed. There are typically above 3000 deaths/week due to Pneumonia and 200/week due to influenza at this time of year. We had a smallish spike in mid-late January, where for 3 consecutive weeks, deaths were above trend at nearly 4000 & 400 per week.

If you assume a 1% mortality rate for COVID, and you assume all deaths are due to pneumonia, and you assume the entire late-January spike is due to COVID, that could be hiding 300,000-400,000 US cases. (To be clear, those are all questionable assumptions! The mortality rate could easily be either lower or higher, a meaningful fraction of deaths might not show as pneumonia or influenza, and it is normal for there to be a moderate spike above trend at some point in the flu season)

That doesn't mean that there were or weren't a few hundred thousand cases in that time -- it just means that some significant number of cases could easily hide in "routine-looking" spikes in the graph.

This does mean, though, that it is unlikely that everybody who got "the really bad flu" that's been going around this year actually had COVID -- but, especially if you live in a place with lots of people who travel to China regularly (like I do!), it isn't unreasonable to wonder if that "really bad flu followed by a lower-respiratory-tract infection that tested negative for influenza" you got in late January/early February wasn't really COVID.

(Remember, though, that while the rapid influenza test has a pretty low false-positive rate, it's got about a 50% false negative rate -- so testing negative shouldn't lead you to assume it isn't influenza)

If you are in ICU with flu symptoms, they don't just shrug when the rapid influenza test comes back negative. There are reflex tests that can be run to confirm positive or negative.

Yep.

Critical cases and fatal cases are way more likely to be detected for this reason -- but during the 3 weeks I was talking about, it was believed that there was no COVID in the US, except for folks evacuated from China to quarantine sites.

During that time unexplained pneumonia leading to death -- especially in an older individual -- would likely not have been thought to be COVID, and would just have gone on the books as pneumonia.

I could be totally wrong in reading the chart, if you look at the 18-64 age group it's above normal levels and have been all year.

14% of cases result in severe pneumonia. R0 is about 4. Average incubation time 6 days. Average time to death/severe illness from onset of symptoms 16 days. If your folks and you got COVID before the Wuhan quarantine you would know someone, likely several people, personally who is/are in the hospital right now with severe respiratory distress.

I'm seeing more indications of people taking things seriously. The first cases were announced in my state (Michigan) today, and already most universities have cancelled in-person learning, various gatherings are being cancelled, etc. It sounds like my church—on the west side of the state (the two confirmed cases are on the east side)—will be altering plans, perhaps even cancelling services as early as this Sunday. The concept of "social distancing" is rapidly gaining steam.

"it's well beyond containment IMHO"

This depends on how you're defining containment. Grounding aircraft may not decrease the current case count, you're right, but it may help not adding to it, or adding as much, or as fast. Because of this, it may still be worth doing.

The notion that we're going to abandon containment measures in favor of mitigation, which I've seen in many places (not in your comment though of course), is wrong. We're going to be doing both.

My 2 cents.

All reductions in (non-essential) travel are good in a pandemic. That doesn't mean it's sufficient, but it's something positive.

I think we would all like to see stronger social distancing rules domestically (in the US), but here the US has a problem as it granted the President broad discretionary powers to suspend international travel but not domestic gatherings, which can't be banned via executive order and even if congress were to pass a law banning such gatherings, there would be first amendment implications as well as federalism issues.

It's not easy to pass a law giving the President this type of power and I suspect many in congress already rue passing the laws that gave the president power to suspend international travel. That's one of the prices of living in a federal government with separation of powers and a bill of rights guaranteeing right to assembly rather than in a place like China.

For example, the CDC has issued social distancing guidelines but they are only guidelines not laws: Santa Clara county has said "no thank you we'll follow our own guidelines" instead, when the CDC asked to ban meetings of more than 250 but Santa Clara banned meetings of more than 1000, and just refused to change their target to the CDC recommendation.

So the US simply lacks the tools that would allow the President to go on the air and announce "I'm declaring that the MLB season needs to be delayed and Disneyland must close." He can try to exert pressure, or rather have the CDC exert pressure, but these types of declarations are not going to happen in America.

OP's point wasn't "this is only going to have very limited effect", to which your reply "better than nothing" would be appropriate.

Their point is that there's absolutely no effect of banning travel between two areas with similar prevalence, based on rather simple logic.

Take two bags with mostly white and a similar number of red balls in them. Then, twenty times, grab one hand from each bag and empty it in the other. What's the expected change in number of red balls?

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.

It's not clear the US does have fewer proportions of actual cases, just fewer tested ones.

Saying the virus cannot be stopped seems defeatist. China seems to have managed it locally, albeit with some very aggressive measures.

It’s only a matter of time before it starts over there again, even if through back-propagation from other countries. Everyone’s talking as though China solved the problem. Incredible.

They don't need to solve the problem, just keep the infection rate slow enough to be controlled medically. And then keep everything locked down enough until we can get a vaccine produced. Admittedly, a gargantuan task, and I don't think it's going to happen anywhere else.

They don't need to do that either, they could just let more people die.

That's what you're proposing, if you don't realize it. If you get the growth rate below 1, you can wipe out the disease, instead of merely delaying it.

This is false. Any reduction in travel is going to have a positive effect. The best situation is for people to reduce their exposure to other people and to stay at home. If they do need to be exposed to others, the best is for them to be exposed to the same set of people all the time, and not to different sets of people.

This seems not fully worked out. Assuming total travel is constrained, selectively limiting travel to particular areas concentrates travel in the remaining areas, which increases the average number of contacts between travelers, which violates your “reducing exposure to other people is best” rule of thumb.

By your model, some reductions in travel ought to have a negative effect. Is that a fair corollary?

The pressure / desire to travel is also dropping sharply, though.

Limiting all Schengen traffic is an extreme example, but it's not obvious that some level of restriction would necessarily produce a significant bottleneck effect (given that citizens are exempt).

Why would you assume total travel is constrained? Restricting travel from Europe to US will just eliminate that portion of travel, not concentrate it in the US.

There’s no such thing as a fixed amount of travel, and constraining it on one way concentrates it in another. That makes no sense. Constraining travel will reduce travel, which will reduce interactions between people, which will reduce the spread of the virus. We know this empirically from previous outbreaks and countermeasures.

First infections are not uniformly distributed. Second, by the nature of travel people get into close contact with more and more importantly different people than usual. 200 people sitting in an aircraft for 2 hours is inherently more risky than 200 people sitting in a theater for 2 hours as aircraft mix people from wider geographic areas. So, regardless of infection rates, this is beneficial for both Europe and the US at the same time.

Multiple cities with hundreds of thousands of people in both the US and Europe are infection free right now. Extending that for even a few weeks is very useful.

Apart from the other two replies, the corollary of your point is that travel from a lower incidence area to a higher incidence area actually reduces the risk in the latter.

But this is clearly false because population density is another important factor for contact between people.

> ... the US has a problem as it granted the President broad discretionary powers to suspend international travel but not domestic gatherings, which can't be banned via executive order and even if congress were to pass a law banning such gatherings, there would be first amendment implications as well as federalism issues.

I don't know how strong that actually is. Over the past few years, we've seen some Trump work the courts pretty consistently. Even if his administration is doing something explicitly unconstitutional, running something all the way to the Supreme Court can take 6 to 18 months, during which time the unconstitutional order would stand (if not stayed early on).

Banning public gatherings is really something that should be done on the municipal level, maybe the state level. The federal government should not have the power to disrupt every day life from thousands of miles away.

Exactly. And blanket policies are almost always terrible. Local communities have different constraints and different environments. There's no reason to believe that Fargo, North Dakota should have to respond to this in the same way that New York City does.

A virus spreads just as easily in a crowded room in Fargo as it does in NYC.

China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong King all slowed the curve, and have rules governing their whole country.

Singapore and Taiwan are basically cities, very dense. China is a Communist country with all kinds of totalitarian policies. South Korean cases are still climbing at more than 100 a day. You can't tell precisely what the growth curve has been because there's going to be a higher bias when they ramp up testing in many countries.

At any rate, no, a town that has 50 people per square mile should not be forced to respond in the same way as some city with 50,000 people per square mile. In the meantime, the people of Fargo have all the relevant information and their local officials can make calls as needed to suit their demands.

The rule "no gatherings over 250 people" isn't a blanket rule. It will impact cities more than rural places. The flexibility is already built into the schema.

I sympathize with this view, but it does make it harder to respond quickly with nationwide lockdowns, which is the flip side of living in such a connected world.

Long term, I think some mechanism to mandate more social isolation is going to be needed.

For example when travelling from California to Arizona, there is currently no quarantine area or checkpoint, and that's fine if you want free movement, but then it's harder to say that states should run their own pandemic policy as long as there is free movement between states.

And this is a general trade off. More interconnected world => localism is less viable as a means of countering global threats.

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.

Even with an exclusive contract, a nation such as the US should be able to quickly ramp production of all the test kits, masks, latex gloves, respirators, oxygen concentrators, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals that we need.

Yet we can't.

That's crazy and it has to change.

Oh we certainly can. "We" have decided not to, for now. One day we might find out the who/why/how of this decision. That will be an interesting day.

The who is pretty much everyone in government, egged on by the business community with the tacit approval or at least disinterest of the public. The when is constant over the past half century. The how is outsourcing much of our productive capability around the globe. The why is the race to the bottom for the cheapest production cost.

I don't think so. This is not a case like where we need a bunch of steal but the steel mills are closed so we have to buy the Chinese steel so (as any good business-folks will do) they raise prices 8-fold (see Oakland Bay Bridge Fiasco). The reagents for these tests are all made in america, or would take a few days to ramp up. I once made enough Taq polymerase in 12 hours to supply a lab for 12 years doing 200 PCRs a day. A single person can make gram quantities of the required oligos (enough for 100,000 PCR reactions) in any one of 500 labs in the Bay area alone in 12 hours. RT takes an hour. Amplification takes 4 hours. The readout for a sample can be done 1500 at a time in one second. There are no excuses.

Could be, think of Homeland Security and those new(er) airport scanners. Mike Chertoff, formerly Secretary of Homeland Security, was instrumental in making them happen. He also happened to own a huge stake in the company that made them, since acquired by BAE Systems (who later made him a Chairman).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff

> exclusive contract for a personal friend

Similarly in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, a politically connected one-man "energy company" called Whitefish, with no experience or skills, emerged out of nowhere and was given the contracts to rebuild the entire Puerto Rican grid.

Months later nothing had happened other than he hired a few people as unskilled as himself who were just dorking around down there, while people died.

So they fired that guy and hired another company called Cobra, with the same terrible terms, and the same ineffective response. Eventually it was found out that Cobra people had paid massive bribes to officials to ensure the deal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/puerto-rico-fema-arres...

Whitefish was getting stuff done. It was more than one man. It had the needed skill, which was subcontracting. Whitefish got numerous teams operational in Puerto Rico before being yanked off the job by politics.

The whole story of Whitefish being unqualified is just corrupt politics. Subcontracting is a legitimate way to get the work done.

The red tape thing is nonsense. What was lacking was/is political will. CDC/FDA/States could increase testing 100-fold overnight if they really wanted to. A decision has been made to proceed differently. Hopefully this decision is reconsidered over the next few days or things are going to get much worse. Currently, as far as I can tell, we are doing about 1000 tests a day nationwide. I can order the necessary reagents and a few water baths and a cheap microtiter plate fluorometer for overnight delivery and do a 1000 of these tests a day by hand.

I have read somewhere that CDC was trying to make a 3-in-1 test kit for SARS, MERS and this new SARS-Cov-2 virus but it was giving bad accuracy and false positives, and now they are making the one for the sars-cov-2 only.

They were making a 3 in 1 kit, but that's because the 1 was an internal control and the other 2 were two different places in the viral genome in case one mutated and became silent.

Can you cite anything to back this up?

Any standard first year undergrad level biology book will describe how to run an RT-PCR test (which is what they are doing). None of the reagents and processes are difficult to make or source.

Because the virus respects county boundaries?

> I'm declaring that the MLB season needs to be delayed

The NBA just suspended their season "until further notice".

Right and it wasn't the president's decision. Not sure what your point is.

"An observation of something that was presently occurring that had some relevance to the discussion".

During the Blackhawks game, the announces claim that the official NHL stance is unclear and they will be making an announcement tomorrow. They had 21k in attendance at the game tonight.

> even if congress were to pass a law banning such gatherings, there would be first amendment implications

Isn't there an obvious compelling state interest?

The hurdle would then be that it’s the feds’ responsibility to prove that this is the smallest infringement that would accomplish the government’s intention.

There's always a "compelling state interest" when it comes to violating the bill of rights.

Counter-example: "You may not print that--the President doesn't like dad jokes."

Strict scrutiny requires not only a compelling state interest but that the restriction be narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means that satisfies the purpose. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny .

>All reductions in (non-essential) travel are good in a pandemic.

All travel is essential to somebody. All restrictions on movement also have a cost, and any analysis that only looks at the benefits of something without looking at the costs cannot hope to be correct.

I'm curious to the downvoters, do you generally believe it's a good idea to make public policy decisions without considering the downsides? It's like people who want to ban encryption because it could marginally increase the number of terrorists caught.

Of course we should consider the downsides when we make public policy decisions. In fact, if we weren't, we wouldn't be making decisions at all but merely reacting.

But we can consider the downsides and decide that we want to restrict travel.

I don't actually need to go visit my rellies. I want to, but I don't have to. On the other hand, if I go on a voluntary trip, I probably have to return home because I can't really afford a hotel indefinitely into the future.

So it's obvious to me that there is some distinction between necessary and nice to have.

I genuinely have been underwhelmed by the reaction to this disease through much of the world. It is necessary in a constitutional democracy to react sometimes to maintain the trust of the voters - or they might say "A democracy is fine when things are going well, but when the chips are down we need a strong leader who can make the decisions we need". Saying "those entertainment business can't open during this outbreak", "keep your tables at least a metre apart" and "don't travel" are reasonable reactions in this circumstance. And we need democratic leaders so that they can know when it's gone on for too long and they have to accept we can't stop it - something a "strong leader" can't tell.

> All travel is essential to somebody

I travelled to starbucks today. I’d hardly consider that essential.

Aye, just got back from walking there. Pretty essential to doing IT for several hours, though, IMO.

But OPs point stands -- unless you're working from home and never going out to eat / get groceries / not go crazy from cabin fever you have to travel somewhere

I haven't tasted coffee in a decade, and I'm doing just finezzzzzzzz....~

Restricting routine trips to just home-to-work, work-to-home, and large-scale resupply missions is still acceptable at the moment. Make use of your local grocery's picker service with delivery to the parking lot, if you can.

Consider switching your dining-out trips to ordering via phone, fax, or electronic ordering system, and doing drive-through, carry-out, or parking-lot pickup. Pay electronically, in advance, instead of handling cash at the point-of-sale terminal. If you get cabin fever, and need to socialize, do it through screens.

It is essential for Starbucks to serve customers in order for them to stay in business. You don't have to stop going. But you can put in your order via website or app; walk into the retail location only when it's ready; pick it up without speaking to, breathing on, or touching anyone; and then leave immediately. It is possible to minimize the duration and intensity of contact, without eliminating it entirely.

It is better to be in contact with your regular friends, acquaintances, and business associates--that are all the same people every day--than to have a lot of transient contacts with complete strangers. It is slower to traverse a social network one connection at a time than to hit a lot of random, unconnected people all at once with a brodcast.

What about to your job, if you don't have a job that you can do remotely? Employers generally don't like paying people who can't make it in to work, and it's hard to pay for food without money.

Even if employers were happy to pay the wages, most small employers aren't going to be able to keep going when incoming cashflow goes to zero

I assume the U.S. government will be pumping money directly into the hands of small businesses and employees.

You assume a hell of a lot.

> All travel is essential to somebody.

Not at all.

Something I've never been clear on... what can and can't be banned through executive order?

It's not just about containment, which signs point to being past us. If we slow the infection and spread it out over time, we do a couple things. Slowing it gives us time to develop tests and treatment and processes and systems to deal with it. Spreading it out over time means that at any given moment fewer people need medical care. Like, if everyone needs care tomorrow, obviously the system can't handle it, but if a few people need it tomorrow, and a few the day after and so on, spreading it out over time, the system can handle a few at a time.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

Travel bans alone will not flatten out peak infections that are going to overload our existing healthcare infrastructure that already run at near maximum capacity during regular, non-epidemic periods.

There is a lot more leadership across government (federal, state, local), private industry, and independent individuals could be doing to proactively reduce transference and even stomp out significant portions of infection is followed through. My point is that our cultural trends surrounding all of these (governments, work, personal action) are almost all running counter to what we need to be doing.

We need strong government leadership at all levels pushing support out where possible, be it resources, accurate non-politically influenced/dictated information, etc. Businesses can be more proactively supporting work from home more where feasible, extend sick leave or create sick leave options to reduce pressures to work, provide some security/continued employment for those who need it (especially demographics at high risk). People can avoid attending work when sick, reduce/limit public exposure (be it out shopping, attending an event, etc.), practice frequent hand washing, limit exposing themselves to at risk populations, etc.

Economically it's a disaster (as the markets are also anticipating) but it's going to be one way or another. It seems to me that you're better off to take a well calculated hit that can bounce back to a healthy workforce that doesn't strain existing healthcare infrastructure than trying to pretend nothing is going on, minimal fallout will occur, and play-it-by ear.

When you say "take a well calculated hit" do you mean "let a ton of people die?"

Well calculated hit in an economic sense. As a side effect I suppose you could argue that some economic losses can lead to deaths... but that's certainly not the goal.

In Boston, at least, I'm seeing significant cultural changes. It's gotten much, much quieter, and meetings are all going online.

I've seen many tech companies in the Boston area announce employees can (or must) work from home, since the governor of Massachusetts declared a state of emergency on Tuesday and encouraged such actions. All governors should do likewise.

Admittedly, the Biogen conference was... a bit of a fuck-up. But yes, all our universities are sending their kids home, white-collar workplaces are moving towards WFH policies, etc. I've been WFH since earlier this week myself, and I went shopping for food and soap with my wife Tuesday night.

It'd be pretty sweet if it took a pandemic for the government to solidify sick day laws.

Too bad money making is somehow above preventing others getting sick. People wouldnt show up to work if they didn't have to worry about their wages. I'm sorry but 3 sick days is garbage and requiring doctors notes is asine when your healthcare plan is shite. Not to mention wasting a day in a hospital. Companies can afford this stuff. It's not often and it's minimal to say the least. But God forbid a small business can't have someone for 80 hours a week at minimum wage!

Which democratic(* - I was going to use Western) nations do though? Seriously the freedom enjoyed by those in these nations and the significant time any global conflict or pandemic have pretty much restricted the ability of leadership in those countries from taking action that would have any true effect short of trying to implement martial law, which in most countries would be met with protests and in some with courts being tied up.

Now I will not attempt to speak for Europe but the US government could certainly push short public advisories and messages to adults and children through broadcast TV and even get the cooperation of streaming services as well. Short thirty to ninety second spots that give helpful non panic information.

The US President is hamstrung by both political disagreement and the law. There were articles he is loathe to declare any national emergency declaration until approached by the governors of many of the states. If he did without states approaching him and asking you can damn well guarantee there were would be Democrats out there claiming he was trying to be a Dictator and comparing him to Putin. The same article concerning the declaration also reveals all the behind the scenes work going on with Congress to get funds in place before any message is put forth so that the government as a whole looks to be cooperating as well as acting appropriately.

As someone posted on FB, the infection rate spikes a lot more with no measures, and flattens with more preventative measures. So while the same number of people may be infected overall, it lessens stress on the healthcare system when it is more spread out.

The current administration in the US has been more proactive than any previous administration during any previous outbreak, despite the deluge of criticisms that were surprisingly absent during said previous outbreaks. The measures that have been taken thus far are more than aggressive enough, based on the information we currently have. We're just a few steps away from shutting everything down completely, which wouldn't be good for anything at this point. It doesn't get much more proactive than that.

Be careful here with an opinion like that, it doesn't fare well most of the time unfortunately.

Hah, yes indeed! But I got the karma to spare. ;-)

Air freight rates skyrocketed due to fewer passenger flights between US and China. Presumably there will be similar impact to air freight rates between US and Europe https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-airlin...

edit: air cargo flights between US and Europe also suspended

> Which is the goal, reduce infection rates.

There are tens of thousands of incubating cases in the United States already. How exactly is a few dozen sick passengers per day going to affect that at all? You'd have to literally be picking up and flying in planes full of active cases to even match what we have here already.

This is insanity. No one with any expertise at all recommended it. No one serious thinks this is a good idea. It's not going to do anything useful at all.

It's security theater, just like airport security screening. The politicians need to be seen doing something.

Don't put this on "The Politicians". There is exactly one politician in the world that sees closing the borders as the solution to all their problems.

What?

I can't even tell if this is supposed to be about Trump. Also it doesn't matter.

There are thousands of borders and even more politicians on this planet and if you don't think borders are the scapegoat for problems the world over, then you're really thinking very small.

To be fair there's quite a few of them, but I get our point.

It's also on message. America First. You stop coming here. You're the problem, I alone can protect you from the bad hombres/virus people...

Don't look into yourself and see what can be fixed, always blame the other.

Yep, notice how in the speech how many times he mentioned China and blamed Europe for not closing off to China.

Unfortunately this kind of measure is going to increase the R0 of the virus, because some people will think "oh I see, the virus is over there, and now the president has closed off that vector."

Part of that message isn't wrong. The virus didn't originate in the US.

Statistically, it did. The overwhelming (!) majority of COVID-19 cases in the US are domestically transmitted. Who cares where patient zero came from at this point? Banning travel is going to do nothing.

Any restriction in travel will help to slow the spread of the virus. If you look at Europe, a sizeable number of cases outside of Italy are still travel related. Stopping all travel is one of the key measures to keep infections local.

I'm not saying the measure suffices. Obviously domestic travel is also a big issue, as is travel from outside the Schengen area. But being one of the people affected (currently in Schengen), I still believe this is a right step. It might not slow infections down enough but it will certainly prevent many cases. Also, it will remind people how serious the situation is.

This will still definitely slow down the total amount of infections.

>You'd have to literally be picking up and flying in planes full of active cases to even match what we have here already

Even one person with corona can do a lot of damage.

For example, a singular person boarded Diamond Princess. The ship had 696 confirmed positive cases and 7 deaths from 1 person who had the virus.

I would imagine anyone who can answer that question comprehensively is filling their boots on some options dealer page right now, in between sips of champagne.

Trade should not be affected. According to the BBC: The US president said his travel ban did not include Americans who had undergone appropriate screenings - or "the tremendous amount of trade and cargo".

To reiterate what others said, it is long past containment in the United States. In Canada early on the cases were people who came from known hot spots. Now it is almost entirely people coming from the United States, from places with no known cases.

Clearly there are clusters throughout the United States. Unconfirmed, unrecognized clusters. And with the adversity of many to utilizing health care, it seems impossible to deal with now.

It's also worth noting that this flight ban applies only to non-Americans, just as the Wuhan restriction before did. During the prior travel restriction dozens of flights a day were going to and from Wuhan -- they just had Americans on them, who apparently aren't susceptible to the foreign virus. This new restriction is identical, allowing Americans to march the globe with their COVID-19, but at least they kept out the foreigners.

Instead of any actual efforts it is again mere security theater. And again Trump will pat himself on the back for his very-close-to-useless theatrics.

I think elementary/high schools are how this will spread through communities with the most efficiency. Collect a person from each family, mix them together with the poorest respect for hygiene, then send them home, 5 times a week.

Here's the perspective of a San Jose public high school [1] proving that containment isn't a concern:

> Oak Grove High School officials said they were not considering school closures because “children have not been shown to be a high-risk group for serious illness from this virus.” The Centers for Disease Control said last week that limited reports showed child COVID-19 patients in China had generally presented with mild symptoms.

> “As much as possible, children should be allowed to carry on with their education and normal activities,” school officials said.

Related, a family member received a "exposure notice" from her child's school that one of the students tested positive. No closure.

There's no attempt for containment in the US. My hunch is that it's not needed as much as is being suggested by some. I guess we'll see.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/08/oak-grove-high-school...

Correction: The bay area schools have shut down for 3 weeks. :)

> It's also worth noting that this flight ban applies only to non-Americans, just as the Wuhan restriction before did. During the prior travel restriction dozens of flights a day were going to and from Wuhan -- they just had Americans on them, who apparently aren't susceptible to the foreign virus. This new restriction is identical, allowing Americans to march the globe with their COVID-19, but at least they kept out the foreigners.

Well presumably they'll always allow non-Americans to leave. As for americans, they would still have to wade through quarantine or whatever restrictions the other country requires.

For entry into the US, does the govt even has the power to keep americans and permanent residents from entering? Seems like every country will at worst only quarantine its own people.

The US can't restrict its own citizens from returning (although it could certainly impose a quarantine), and I didn't claim or imply that they should.

The point is that the action is farce. Those flights to and from Wuhan were always full of primarily Americans, and continued unabated. Just as Americans can still fly to and from Europe, though obviously carriers are going to drastically cut the flight counts.

Regardless, it is without an ounce of doubt that COVID-19 is spreading, completely uncontrolled, throughout the US. Italy is a week or so ahead of the United States, but sadly the most probable outcome is a catastrophe in the near future.

I agree we are maybe 1.5 weeks behind Italy. Though hopefully it never explodes quite as fast in most of the US due to lower population density and other cultural differences. But as for travel bans, the complaint is that they only slow the spread, in return for economic and other downsides. But I'll take that. The flatter the curve is the better.

> Can anyone comment on supply chains that rely on Europe to source goods?

You know all of the stuff that's made in China? The machines that make that stuff are made in Europe. Well, not literally the ones that make the stuff in China, but the ones that US companies would buy if they were trying to manufacture more stuff domestically to replace the stuff they can no longer buy from China.

I think yes, literally, European machinery exported to China.

It's a massive export sector for the EU (€127bn), and a chunk of that is to China, but the easily-available statistics lump machinery and vehicles, so I don't have a source.

China has started making some of their own machinery in the last 30 years. The quality generally isn't going to be as good as machinery coming from a company that's been making the same thing for 300 years, albeit for them using it internally that doesn't matter as much when the person who designed the machine is right there and can trouble shoot it in person.

It will get interessting. because of the huge container backlog / production backlog in China Europe is facing a serious container shortage right now. Until this is figured out and solved, supply chain management will be a very interesting job.

But by no means end-of-world serious, all life critical things are still getting through. also money buys a lot, even cargo space on ships and planes.

There was an AMA on Reddit, yesterday I think, with a guy whose employer is manufacturing the tests. He said one of the challenges was some of the materials had to come from Belgium and it was taking much longer to get the supplies in the needed quantities. I'd assume such materials would be exempt if his statement is correct.

You can't get around it by going through the UK. It applies whether you've been to the countries affected at any point in the last 14 days, even if it's not your immediate origin port.

The President, for want of a better term is an idiot. When there is plenty of time to act he does nothing, and when the crisis is in full swing he makes symbolic gestures that have but one goal: to increase his chances of re-election. This has absolutely nothing to do with public health.

I couldn't agree more. In the next week, we'll see flights canceled to and from most countries in Europe anyway, so this is a cheap attempt to point the finger at Europe, and away at this administration.

Certainly not cheap...

Important updates:

a) This does not apply to US citizens or their family members[1].

b) This does not apply to cargo[2].

It appears that the President misspoke regarding point 2.

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting....

[2] https://twitter.com/AnaSwanson/status/1237921160500830208

Thankfully it was just a small error... Also looks like it won't affect outbound flights either?

Outbound flights are going to get a hell of a lot more expensive if all the planes have to return to the US empty.

Would assume that any flights booked in under 30 days before travel will be expensive no matter what the situation.

Dangerous assumption -- most domestic and international flights are the cheapest I have ever seen them.

I mean generally, if booking flights for the next week (in general) they are expensive.

Yes, in non-pandemic times that is true. :)

Nah, all planes are just going to be routed through a non-European destination en route back. The Azores are about to be very popular.

The Azores is part of Portugal, which is on the travel ban list.

The ban is on the Schengen area, which does include the Azores.

I live on an island. There are all sorts of weird legal things that play out on these bits of rock. I suspect that there are all sorts of lawyers reading interesting bits of definitions of treaties and history right now.

It's about whether you've been to Europe at all in the 14 days preceding, not about whether your immediate origin was European.

And for Schengen, you'll have a stamp in and out (assuming 1 passport).

No Schengen stamps if you already live in the Schengen area. Unless there is data sharing the US gov wouldn’t be able to see it from a passport.

I suppose it will be another question on the form. Next to ‘I am not a terrorist’

As a side-note: I saw the forms that my great grandparents had to fill out when entering the US from Europe back in 1905 or thereabouts. There was a checkbox for "anarchist"

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

or Britain, or Turkey

Turkey is also erecting public event suspension (trade fairs and large ceremonies cancelled by today), so not going to work.

doesn't mean you can't fly to the US from there.

The Azores are in Europe.

They don't need to be routed through a non-European destination. Crew are exempt. The airlines will just deny boarding to people subject to the ban (which is non-exempt people who have been in Schengen in the last 14 days, not people who just came from there).

It's not a flight ban it's based on the physical presence of the traveller

Not to mention probably there's only a small use case of going to Europe without needing to return.

US citizens can always return though. It's kind of unconstitutional to stop them from returning.

There is the small matter of a 2-week quarantine upon return though.

Just because citizens can legally return does not mean that doing so is viable or economical - the government has no legal obligation to make sure there are 1) flights to and from the US that 2) are affordable. Those are going to be the big issues.

> It's kind of unconstitutional to stop them from returning.

Sort of. The trick is to get the airline overseas to refuse boarding. (Probably) not unconstitutional because it's not US soil.

Just like how the US directs airlines overseas to refuse boarding if you show a US birth certificate and photo ID instead of a US passport.

He made several errors. He also said Europe minus the UK was banned, but it's actually the Schengen Area.

Misspoke? It was a prepared statement read off a teleprompter. Please don't excuse it like a slip of the tongue.

Are you saying it is more accurate to call it a lie?

That sounds like the subtext

I imagine what he meant was that the administration is now backtracking on that statement.

Yes. I don't think it was a lie since it would needlessly create problems, but it was either the initial idea that was hastily revised after seeing the market reaction, or rank carelessness.

It's fun to joke about a politician's gaffes, and simple verbal slips are understandable - I noticed several in the speech but they were not substantive or significant. However, I think when drafting and reading a preapred statement on a topic of grave importance politicians have an obligation to say what they actually mean.

[EDIT] Since the downvotes have started pouring in, I have to ask. Do you really attribute to this error to malice rather than stupidity? Given that the administration immediately (within minutes? edit: [0]yes, within minutes) made a correction I find it difficult to believe it was deliberate misinformation.

I mean, miscommunication happens. Trump didn't invent the plan, he was advised by others and gave the go-ahead. Then, his advisors drafted all of the details of the plan (probably in very short order). And of course, he didn't write the speech, someone prepared it for him. Afterward, the speech changed hands numerous times until some staff member loaded it into the prompter.

Someone definitely messed up, but it's hard for me to see how anyone could blame the speaker for this one. Assuming there's no partisanship, of course.

[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/11/trum...

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 involving dozens of people are prone to human error.

I feel that this administration is actively hostile to the well-being of the United States, but I've been telling people since day 1 that it's counter productive to make fun of Trump and nit pick at every error regardless of how tiny or inconsequential. At the very best it diverts attention from the actual problems with this administration and at worst deepens into the political chasm we seem to have in this country.

I completely agree. It's objectively counter-productive to over-exaggerate every little thing.

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.

I respect your position and the desire for professionalism. I differ in regard to the expectations of people, however. Even under the best of circumstances with the benefit of a lot of time (we don't have a clue about the intelligence that triggered this, so we don't know if they put this together in a day or a week) I still expect errors. Perhaps I'm cynical, but I just assume human beings will break things and screw up whenever they are given the opportunity. In the case of the white house press corps, there's a lot of opportunity for that.

That's why Obama had to issue immediate corrections regarding troop deployments, economy, and policies. There's too many moving parts.

Not malice.. I attribute it to DOW futures dropping 400 points within minutes of him saying that. So they backtracked as quickly as possible.

But I also don't believe this speech would have happened tonight if it had been a up day on the stock market. I think that is the only lens they are looking at this through.

In regular conversation, would you call cargo shipments “travel”? Probably not. Commerce, trade, or shipments would probably be used.

He misread it, watch the video.

Unacceptable

Another theory: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/what-if-donald-t...

Blindness? Seriously?

He seems more like a dyslexic who's always over compensating with bluster to avoid reading.

I didn't hear his exact words, but even with a teleprompter, I wouldn't be surprised if he misspoke.

Here is the paragraph from the transcript (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...)

> There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings, and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing. These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom.

It reads a whole lot cleaner, i.e. like you would expect from a speech, if the statement about cargo was intended to say it was not prohibited.

My best guess is honestly that it was meant to be "these prohibitions will not apply to the" instead of "these prohibitions will not only apply to the". Inserting an extra "only" is a pretty easy mistake to make when reading text out loud.

Yep looks like that's what happened: https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1238310742748811264?s=20

a) is because as I understand it it's /very/ hard to legally refuse to readmit a US citizen. You can seize all their stuff at the border but besides arresting them for a crime you can't really keep them from coming home.

As a US citizen currently on a business trip out of the country, that's really good to know!

You may still fave mandatory quarantine. Plan accordingly.

PS- Good luck!

If at all possible, try to get a flight back on a US carrier or a connecting flight via London. It's more likely that Delta/United/American will operate a flight back to the US than for example Lufthansa flying a mostly empty plane to the US. Not in the least because it would look bad in PR terms for a US based airline to leave US citizens stranded in Europe, while a European carrier not flying to the US would attribute the same decision to "Trump does not allow us in".

immigration law does not apply to citizens, basically at all. customs does, but immigration does not.

Doesn’t matter if there’s no flights or boats.

I suspect there will be flights, from the UK (which is why it was left off).

for about 5 days maybe.

I suspect UK was left off because POTUS has resorts in Ireland and Scotland, and no where in Europe. There's nothing credible about UK being off the list while every surrounding country is on it.

I thought it was a reward for our big beautiful breakfast

The UK is an Island nation with entry controls - passports are required even from the EU and there is at least token screening at the airports and docks of people with fever or other virus symptoms.

Not that it’s the same thing, but being an island (so no walking traffic) and having some screening in place means that the UK simply doesn’t have certain diseases (like rabies) that are at least somewhat common in Europe.

Honestly though, the UK is one of, if not THE, staunchest ally of the US and banning its citizens would cause some minor political issues.

Yeah but the UK certainly has the coronavirus and more importantly, Heathrow has it. https://www.airport-technology.com/news/coronavirus-heathrow...

The UK is about a week behind Europe in terms of covid 19

Is that more or less than the US itself?

Hard to say when the US doesn't test.

Note that technically the UK does not require passports for entry from the EU - identity cards are also fine.

Having travelled back to the UK from a Schengen country in the past few days, I can also confirm that there wasn’t so much as a poster in the airport, let alone any actual screening.

Airport screening doesn't work.

"token screening at the airports"

I don't think I've ever had anything that even counts as token screening flying into the UK from Europe - passport check is automated and I've never even seen someone at customs for many years.

POTUS has to have someplace to golf, brag about his being impeached, and make the Queen visibly uncomfortable.

Which makes total sense since the UK is a haven from this pandemic... oh wait. Nope. It's spreading at bloody Heathrow itself: https://www.airport-technology.com/news/coronavirus-heathrow...

UK is currently 29th on total cases per million population (6.7). That's pretty far down the list.

27th (8.7). Things change pretty fast...

There may well be flights. Crew are exempt, so at least for slot-controlled airports it's probably worth flying anyway to keep the slot; you'll have some US citizens / permanent residents and their families, and you can fill the belly with cargo since you have spare weight. Might be worth it even for airports that aren't slot-controlled.

Here in NZ the largest airport with such slots has waived that rule for the duration meaning that airlines can reduce their flights without losing their slots (and therefore be more likely still be around to be a customer for the airport when it is all over)

Various aviation authorities in Europe are relaxing the requirements that is driving the slot controls & ghost flights. Don't have the link now but read it earlier.

Here is one link:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/10/eu-airlines...

a) is not only citizens but also permanent residents, which I believe do not have the same legal protections

IANAL, but while lawful permanent residents do not have the same protections, they still have certain protections that make it legally unclear whether the president can categorically bar entry without an immigration court proceeding for each individual:

"Section 212(f) can certainly apply to applicants for immigrant visas. Whether it can apply to an LPR who is returning and not seeking admission is questionable. This is because under section 101(a)(13)(C), an LPR being covered by a Presidential Proclamation under section 212(f) would not cause the LPR to be considered to be seeking admission."

http://myattorneyusa.com/scope-and-history-of-section-212f-p...

"An alien returning to the United States who has been granted lawful permanent resident status cannot be regarded as seeking an admission and may not be charged with inadmissibility under section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a) (2012), if he or she does not fall within any of the exceptions in section 101(a)(13)(C) of the Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(13)(C) (2012)."

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/file/478111/download

You can't refuse to readmit a US citizen (as in a person that can prove that they're readily a US citizen). They can force you into quarantine and take all your stuff, but you have a right to be in the country.

Even without a passport? If I rocked up to the border of my country without a passport I'm pretty sure I'd be thrown into a detention centre if I wasn't deported on the spot.

Deported to where? :)

Yes, you cannot be refused entry as a US citizen even without a passport. You will be greatly inconvenienced, but not refused. You may be held in a detention center or holding facility until such time as your identity can be verified.

You can't fly to the US without a passport. They wouldn't let you board the plane without it.

You and OP are both right. No one will let you (as a US citizen) board an aircraft back to the US without a passport (so you'll have to head over to a local embassy to get a replacement if you don't have one on your person), but CBP must (not shall, must) allow you re-admittance at a land border without a passport (at which point they will verify your citizenship through a tedious process).

You'd be detained but if you asserted you are a US citizen they are obligated to try and establish the truth of your claim. They'll call family and friends and access government records. In an edge case, I imagine they'd hold a hearing with an immigration judge.

In college, friends of mine frequently went out partying in Tijuana and occasionally lost their passports. They were usually held for a few hours at the border crossing and given a hard time and a stern lecture about responsible behaviour before being readmitted to the US.

> You can't refuse to readmit a US citizen (as in a person that can prove that they're readily a US citizen)

Note the: as in a person that can prove that they're readily a US citizen. If you don't have a passport, you probably can't readily prove you are a citizen.

> a) is because as I understand it it's /very/ hard to legally refuse to readmit a US citizen. You can seize all their stuff at the border but besides arresting them for a crime you can't really keep them from coming home.

The trick is to get the airline to be your police and refuse them boarding. Then your only choice is to get to a Port of Entry via Canada, Mexico, private jet or chartered boat.

Crew are also exempt.

What about connecting flights with layover in Frankfurt?

It also does not apply to Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) AKA Greencard Holders

Does it apply to H1B holders? (Are they “US residents”?)

I don't know for sure but my assumption is that H1B holders (and potentially green card holders, which are "permanent residents") are not excluded from this ban. As many others have mentioned here it's not easy to prevent a citizen from returning; permanent residents and visa holders can be refused entry much more easily.

I didn't write this rule though so I don't know if this interpretation is correct.

Most importantly, H1B holders are not permanent residents. It's very much a temporary. Most countries that are issuing travel bans exclude citizens and permanent residents.

This applies to H1B holders. Basically if you have a non-immigrant visa, you can assume this rule applies to you.

The rule only excludes US citizens, green card holders and their immediate families.

An executive order is not in effect until published in the federal register. Whatever is published there is what actually matters.

As of now this executive order has not been published.

You can check here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/search?conditions%...

Underrated comment ^^

I assume the following [1] will be filed in the Federal Register beginning with this paragraph that starts with:

  NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States

and then starting with the words

  by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

Here is the full text that will likely be published in the Federal Register. Double-check when it has been published.

> by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and 1185(a), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, hereby find that the unrestricted entry into the United States of persons described in section 1 of this proclamation would, except as provided for in section 2 of this proclamation, be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and that their entry should be subject to certain restrictions, limitations, and exceptions. I therefore hereby proclaim the following:

> Section 1. Suspension and Limitation on Entry. The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of all aliens who were physically present within the Schengen Area during the 14-day period preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States is hereby suspended and limited subject to section 2 of this proclamation.

> Sec. 2. Scope of Suspension and Limitation on Entry.

> (a) Section 1 of this proclamation shall not apply to:

> (i) any lawful permanent resident of the United States;

> (ii) any alien who is the spouse of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident;

> (iii) any alien who is the parent or legal guardian of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, provided that the U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident is unmarried and under the age of 21;

> (iv) any alien who is the sibling of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, provided that both are unmarried and under the age of 21;

> (v) any alien who is the child, foster child, or ward of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, or who is a prospective adoptee seeking to enter the United States pursuant to the IR-4 or IH-4 visa classifications;

> (vi) any alien traveling at the invitation of the United States Government for a purpose related to containment or mitigation of the virus;

> (vii) any alien traveling as a nonimmigrant pursuant to a C-1, D, or C-1/D nonimmigrant visa as a crewmember or any alien otherwise traveling to the United States as air or sea crew;

> (viii) any alien

> (A) seeking entry into or transiting the United States pursuant to one of the following visas: A-1, A-2, C-2, C-3 (as a foreign government official or immediate family member of an official), E-1 (as an employee of TECRO or TECO or the employee’s immediate family members), G-1, G-2, G-3, G-4, NATO-1 through NATO-4, or NATO-6 (or seeking to enter as a nonimmigrant in one of those NATO categories); or

> (B) whose travel falls within the scope of section 11 of the United Nations Headquarters Agreement;

> (ix) any alien whose entry would not pose a significant risk of introducing, transmitting, or spreading the virus, as determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, through the CDC Director or his designee;

> (x) any alien whose entry would further important United States law enforcement objectives, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their respective designees, based on a recommendation of the Attorney General or his designee;

> (xi) any alien whose entry would be in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their designees; or

> (xii) members of the U.S. Armed Forces and spouses and children of members of the U.S. Armed Forces.

> (b) Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to affect any individual’s eligibility for asylum, withholding of removal, or protection under the regulations issued pursuant to the legislation implementing the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, consistent with the laws and regulations of the United States.

> Sec. 3. Implementation and Enforcement. (a) The Secretary of State shall implement this proclamation as it applies to visas pursuant to such procedures as the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, may establish. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall implement this proclamation as it applies to the entry of aliens pursuant to such procedures as the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, may establish.

> (b) Consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Transportation, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that any alien subject to this proclamation does not board an aircraft traveling to the United States.

> (c) The Secretary of Homeland Security may establish standards and procedures to ensure the application of this proclamation at and between all United States ports of entry.

> (d) An alien who circumvents the application of this proclamation through fraud, willful misrepresentation of a material fact, or illegal entry shall be a priority for removal by the Department of Homeland Security.

> Sec. 4. Termination. This proclamation shall remain in effect until terminated by the President. The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall recommend that the President continue, modify, or terminate this proclamation as described in section 5 of Proclamation 9984, as amended.

> Sec. 5. Effective Date. This proclamation is effective at 11:59 p.m. eastern daylight time on March 13, 2020. This proclamation does not apply to persons aboard a flight scheduled to arrive in the United States that departed prior to 11:59 p.m. eastern daylight time on March 13, 2020.

> Sec. 6. Severability. It is the policy of the United States to enforce this proclamation to the maximum extent possible to advance the national security, public safety, and foreign policy interests of the United States. Accordingly:

> (a) if any provision of this proclamation, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this proclamation and the application of its provisions to any other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby; and

> (b) if any provision of this proclamation, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid because of the lack of certain procedural requirements, the relevant executive branch officials shall implement those procedural requirements to conform with existing law and with any applicable court orders.

> Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

> (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

> (ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

> (b) This proclamation shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

> (c) This proclamation is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

> IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eleventh day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fourth.

> DONALD J. TRUMP

I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons, but it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count, which means this will have almost no effect.

I actually think banning travel from China months ago was a good call, but by analogous reasoning, the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week.

The reason the UK is behind continental Europe is the lack of testing. Their numbers are no worse than continental Europe (excluding Italy, of course). The US, on the other hand, are lightyears behind Europe on testing, the real number of infections is closer to 5000 than to 1250, again bringing it in line with the rest of Europe.

Actually the UK has done a lot more testing than many other countries, more than double the rate of France, and 4x of Japan -

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

I don't know where you get that info from but it is severely outdated or just outright wrong.

Not sure where they get their data, but where I live (Ontario, Canada) we've done 231.5 tests per million people.

Number of tests: 3395 Source: https://www.ontario.ca/page/2019-novel-coronavirus Population: 14,659,616 (estimated for 2019-Q4 found on Wikipedia)

>Not sure where they get their data

The source for each of the figures is in the last column of the table.

Did you just want to post Ontario's numbers (Canada was not in the table at all) or are you questioning the accuracy of the worldometers page?

>The reason the UK is behind continental Europe is the lack of testing

Can you elaborate on this with some sources?

"I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons"

Like extraditing Julian Assange while the world is looking elsewhere.

Don't let a crisis go to waste. Probably same reason for EARN act.

> the right time to ban travel from Europe (including the UK) was last week.

The US had active uncontained clusters, and was known to have them, two weeks ago. Once that's true, there's no way that mere travel numbers are going to move that needles significantly.

Again: we banned travel from China and it was too late already. This does not work. And I'm horrified at the number of people on this site that don't see that.

Banning travel isn't a magic cure-all that guarantees zero cases, it just lowers the initial caseload. That's extremely important because exponential growth is extremely slow in the beginning -- it takes as long to go from 1 to 100 as 100 to 10,000. If banning travel reduces 100 starter cases to 1, you double the time you have.

Problem being, best information is there is no solid numbers on initial case load in the US, for structural reasons. So while your argument may be correct, it may be too late for this to make a difference (perhaps with equal likelihood, but we don't know.)

Yeah, I'd agree with that. At this point it would help a tiny bit, but only because it slightly decreases links between people, like a social distancing measure does.

Some commenters on this post are having a hard time acknowledging this aspect. I think every little bit helps, this included

Every little bit also has a cost, and it's possible for the cost to outweight the benefits, especially when a decision is made without even considering the cost.

True and fair point with which I agree. I don't know all the considerations that went into this decision but I lean towards supporting such plans that limit unnecessary chances for exposure

It won't. Screening all arrivals is helpful, but just shutting down travel is going to end up creating a whole new class of problems.

Medical officers (and Italy) tell us that screening arrivals doesn't help.

I was thinking more for data gathering purposes and so on before the healthcare system collapses under the weight of exponential growth. But I take your point.

> it just lowers the initial caseload

If it's done in time to prevent the bulk of that initial caseload, which is almost certainly not the case here.

I beg to differ. US was the first major country to ban travel from China. Other countries only followed suit after. South Korea, Japan, France, Germany and Italy never did, and see where they are now.

Please do not spread disinformation: Italy banned direct flights from China pretty quickly too.

It did not matter, because patient-0 in Europe was a German. It’s now accepted that the virus arrived by crossing the Alps in some sort of Euro-business trip, not directly from China.

So banning international travel could have at least stopped it from reaching Germany. I think you are making his point while arguing on a technicality. I see no conceivable way that the economic loss of tourism or "business trips" is worse than what is about to go down in Europe.

The infection in Germany happened mid-January, when the Chinese had not even fully admitted to the problem. Chances are it had already reached all continents by the time any travel ban was even considered.

Unless you can read minds, these things happen very quickly now that the world is a global village.

> is worse than what is about to go down in Europe.

It's going down in the US too! We're merely a few days behind. If we had no cases, or a few contained clusters, then this would be an arguably useful policy. We have multiple uncontained outbreaks already, and have yet to enact meaningful policies to contain them.

It's too late. All this ban does is try to shift blame.

>I get that they excluded the UK for diplomatic reasons

No, Ireland is also exempt. In other words, the US is banning travel from the Schengen Zone.

Do you have an official source on that?

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting...

Thanks, this wasn't clear at all from Trump's announcement.

Doesn't mean it's not still partly political, to be clear.

It's rational. UK epidemic is not yet out of control. If you look at the region breakdown in UK the cases are very well geographically distributed, the highest concentration as of yesterday is Hertfordshire with only 13 cases, or London with 100 cases if you consider that one administrative unit. Some epidemics in Schengen are highly focused on specific areas which means the growth rate can be expected to be higher. It makes sense to consider Schengen as one unit as it has open borders. It would make little sense to ban travel from individual countries in Schengen.

> it's literally only a few days behind the rest of Europe in terms of infection count

And it's ahead of some Schengen countries.

Besides that, it is the 'per capita' part that matters and there are great differences between the various countries as to how many tests have been administered, leading to severe discrepancies in the relative pictures between countries.

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 this point I'd sooner believe 93,800 or 938,000 than 938. Oh wait: "Now that states are testing and reporting their own results, CDC’s numbers are not representative of all testing being done nationwide." OK, so nobody's keeping up with the totals? Is that what I'm reading?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html

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.

Except the death rate is determined by deaths/cases, which relies on counting the cases.

There have already been missed deaths that were later attributed to Covid-19 in the US. Since the fatality profile of Covid-19 closely matches the fatality profile you expect anyway (people are more likely to die when they are old or have preconditions), it is actually a problem to get reliable death counts. Fatalities must have been tested, or tested retroactively, for correct attribution, and since the US currently isn't even close to doing proper testing of living patients, you can probably add two and two together by yourself.

The death rate is likely to vary depending on the strain and on the ability to treat effectively, both of which may change over time.

Johns Hopkins is keeping up with the totals.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu

Thanks for that link, very helpful.

The CDC gave local labs the go-ahead to develop their own tests, but that was very recently and it seems very likely that the CDC doesn't have a centralized reporting system in place.

I really doubt there's capacity to do random tests for scientific field study, considering there's a large backlog of people with symptoms or suspected contact w/ infected that are waiting to be tested.

For example, here's aerial footage of the lines in Denver for a drive-thru clinic restricted to patients with "a doctor's order confirming they meet requirements": https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1237869000169644032

It's tragic that a lack of test kits is costing us the ability to accurately track the spread of this disease and its true mortality rate. If right now there are 100,000 (actual) positive and 50 deaths, that's a whole different situation than 1000 (reported) positive and 50 deaths.

Hmm, I'm not so sure...

Even if the mortality rate is much lower than what we suspect today, we know that the health system is going to be overloaded -- just as is the case in Italy.

I've been using this Live Science web page which appears to be fairly regularly updated and sources States data and news reports: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-updates-united-state...

It's been pretty much on the ball.

I've been maintaining a spreadsheet with States-level department of health Covid-19 situation page data and the totals roughly tally.

As of 13:00 GMT March 12: 1,300+ positive cases, 38 deaths. You could multiply the positive number by factor of 10 say to get a rough estimate of the total number of persons tested to this point (~13,000 let's say) that individual states, private labs, and the CDC have checked. (Hard to say though as only about 1/3 to 1/2 of states release full data and some are under-reporting (Nebraska and Texas afaict)) Another niggle is that it can (does?) take more than one "test" to perform a test.

NBA season suspended after an Utah Jazz player, Rudy Golbert, preliminarily tests positive.

This shortly following Golbert jokingly (ugh) rubbing all of the mics at an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qxtxIVtOZE

I was expecting the Curb Your Enthusiasm credits by the end there.

That guy did a little joke which turned into shutting down the whole league. What the hell

Meanwhile, the US Dept of State's Travel Advisories haven't really been recommending any restrictions on travel to Europe.

France is the 2nd most impacted country in Europe, and the DoS' last update was 11 months ago where their primary concern was terrorism.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

Only Italy is currently at "Reconsider Travel" or "Do Not Travel" for the Northern regions.

At least they are consistent. Following at a far enough distance gives you 20/20 hindsight for those you follow, but only if you can internalize the lesson fast enough. Otherwise you just slo-mo replicate their same mistakes.

This is insane. I haven’t been really scared of the pandemic yet, but if this is the response, now, I’m terrified.

Changing the number of infected people entering the community does nothing when we already have transmission happening within the community at some fixed rate which is determined by the community.

“Flattening the curve” of an exponential function means changing the rate of growth, not the fucking constant offset.

It’s basic math. Innocent people will die off this incompetence. I’m a little lost for words.

I really lost heart when Trump addressed the cruise ship incident with "I don't want my numbers to go up." Just manipulation of the numbers to reduce fear/keep stocks up. But if the virus is a threat, it will become undeniable.

I don't normally say this, but I hope Trump's right about the whole thing. Wash your hands and you'll be fine, right? We'll see in a month. Maybe a week.

But even the tinest of improvements is better than no improvements, because we all know the most important thing when making decisions is to only consider the possible benefits and never consider the cost!

Who's going to die because they can't fly between the US and Europe?

If healthcare capacity in the US becomes overwhelmed by an exponential function, every moment wasted by officials now, while the numbers are still low enough to do something real about, will turn out to have been a moment responsible for many thousands of needless deaths.

I hope your flippancy turns out to be warranted. I just can’t get there.

People dying isn't the only consideration; public policy isn't made with the assumption "save human life at all costs", otherwise e.g. private cars (which kill 1-2 million people per year and injure tens of millions more) would be banned by now.

One thing though; which airline will fly only american citizen back from europe? will they fill a plane with those customers only? I think my main concern is that most if not all major European airlines will cancel all flights, regardless if there are a couple of US citizen on the flights. Meaning it's probably still going to be somewhat problematic to get back (if not from London then of course)

They might lose landing rights. That's often enough reason to keep flying, even with empty planes.

And that's what has been going on for a few days inside Europe now. Airlines flying empty or near empty planes to keep their slots. The European Commission was meant to make a move about that, I don't know if that's been done already or not.

I'm trying to find more information about this, as I'm a tourist visiting the US flying back on Sunday. Does anyone know how this will play out, will they keep flying FROM the US to Europe?

If they cancel flights, you'll have to route via the UK.

I suggest getting back to wherever it is you want to spend the next couple months asap.

The levenshtein distance between tourist and terrorist is only 4, so my prognosis looks bleak.

But fun aside, I think you are still fine. To my knowledge no flights from the US seem to be cancelled so far. If they really do cancel flights, you could try to use another route trough another EU country. But I think that is still unlikely to be required. That might change though, but probably not until Sunday.

"The levenshtein distance between tourist and terrorist is only 4..."

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Maybe people don't know what a levenshtein distance is?

> The levenshtein distance between tourist and terrorist is only 4, so my prognosis looks bleak.

The distance in speech is not that far off either, I've found. When I visited the US for the first time, the border agent asked me what I was there for. Tourism, I said. My English pronunciation not being clear enough, he said "excuse me? Can you say that again? TERRORISM?". After that I learned to just say "vacation".

You will want to move while you can. I got caught out due to the 9/11 flight ban and that really wrecked my life for a while.

I'd advise flying back ASAP, you don't want to risk being stuck in the US during a medical emergency.

They had no screening for incoming travelers at airports just a couple of days ago - no health questions or temperature checks, nothing. And now a 30 day ban? This won't solve the problem, but it will vastly exacerbate the economic disruption.

It won't solve the problem, but it might be big enough a move that people realize now is the time to minimize contact as much as possible.

Can we do better than link to the front page of a news site?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/coronavirus-trump-suspends-a...

NYTimes has removed paywall for coronavirus stories: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/world/coronavirus-news.ht...

Better link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-make-pri...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcsZjfs2cB4

Here is the official proclamation: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

This awfully sounds like politically motivated than medically motivated.

Edit: Apparently it’s limited to Schengen Zone: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting...

How so? This will undoubtedly push the world into recession, how does that help Trump?

Just because he can’t anticipate the repercussions doesn’t mean it wasn’t politically motivated

Do you really think some moron bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world? Have you stopped to think about how unlikely something like that is?

You may not agree with his style (I don't) or his personality (hate it) but the guy has to be minimally intelligent to make it as far as he has. At the very least he knows how to work a crowd and spot opportunity.

> Do you really think some moron bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world?

Yes, and in light of anecdotes of how decisions are made in the current administration: double yes

I think you're confusing different kinds of intelligence.

Just to lower the temperature, I'll use a non-political example. My grandfather, long since departed, was a master salesman. He sold all sorts of stuff door to door, including the highly dubious Kirby vacuum cleaners, before ending up in real estate. He was an incredibly good manipulator of people, but he was a very bad planner. He once famously sold the same piece of property to two different people, just for the thrill of the sale. (My grandmother had to sort it all out after.)

Being good at manipulation and bad at planning were deeply related in him and some other scoundrels I've met. Why? Because if you don't care at all about facts or repercussions, you can devote 100% of your attention to telling other people what they want to hear, what they'll believe. And it works the other way, too. If you're very good at talking your way out of problems, you never need to learn things like being disciplined or facing facts.

So yes, it is perfectly possible that some goof bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world. My grandfather, thank goodness, was never very ambitious, so he had a pretty small blast radius. I shudder to think what harm he could have done if he had actually applied himself.

Thank you for the anecdote. It was well written and I think it’s very applicable to the current topic.

Elections are popularity contests. There are no qualification requirements for the job.

Which he didn't even win and is only there because of an anarchism in our government.

Anarchism? Hardly. It's one of the handful of intentionally anti-populist features of the Constitution, along with the existence of the Senate.

He did win. The only way to say he lost is by focusing on a measure that everyone agrees isn't the one that matters.

Well, that seems a little strong. The measure used in the US is one that I don't think is used in any other democracy. Every non-American I've talked with about this believes that national popular vote is definitely the number that matters.

They're wrong, for purposes of American presidential elections anyway.

Then perhaps the people saying that have different purposes. Which I'm sure was dlp211's point as well.

Sure, but I’m not obliged to give any deference to improper purposes like delegitimization of the President.

You don't get to decide what is proper for other people's purposes. They do.

I never claimed that he is illegitimate. Shame on you for not taking my argument in good faith.

The Useful Idiot is absolutely a real thing.

Short term pain may lead to long term political gains. This all plays into the narrative, the story that certain political fractions push.

It’s not like it will change too much anyway(EU and USA will be like Italy in few weeks, they already have the infection spreading). Besides, it was “just a flu” few days ago according to him.

Perhaps certain people want to buy stocks cheaply ...

The restrictions are simultaneously overly broad and yet narrowly tailored. I can't find any sensible justification for it.

If you're trying to draw a cordon sanitaire, then why leave out the busiest hub in the region? I don't see any indication that there's any intention to prevent people from the Europe getting to the US via indirect means (which includes Canada, Iceland, and it seems even the Azores).

And if you're not trying to draw a cordon sanitaire, why go to such an extreme measure? Banning entry of people who have visited afflicted regions in the recent past (as was done for China) is possible, so why not do that instead? Why ban cargo in addition, given that the coronavirus is thought to be unable to survive the week-long voyage without live hosts?

Furthermore, why include Ireland (an island nation so far relatively unaffected by coronavirus) in the ban, but not the UK (an island nation with greater connections to continental Europe, including a connecting tunnel, that is more heavily affected)?

I just did some back-of-the-sleeve calculations on the incidence of Corona-infections in the US which make me wonder which continent is protected against which by this travel ban. My source of information is the video reporting by Dr. John Campbell [1] who thus far has been one of the more level-headed sources on the ongoing pandemic. Here goes:

The official number of cases in the US as reported by Campbell is 1084, with 33 dead. This number roughly tallied with what I see on the CDC site (they report 938 cases, 28 dead) [2].

The major of Seattle estimates there around 1100 infections in this city (source: Campbell's video), a number which could grow to about 70.000 in 6 weeks (source: Campbell's video, most likely based on the spread in Wuhan)

Seattle has a population of around 750.000 people, i.e. 0.146% of the population carries the infection.

The total population of the USA is around 328 million. 95% of the USA land mass consists of rural area with a total population of around 60 million (~20%), the other 80% of the population lives in metropolitan areas (source: Wikipedia).

If the infection rate of Seattle is used as a guide for the infection rate for the entire metropolitan population in the USA there are about 390.000 infected people in the country at the moment. While it is unlikely that this infection rate goes for the entire metropolitan population it is not out of the question given the high mobility of people in the USA. Even if actual the infection rate is a tenth of that in Seattle there are still around 38.000 infected people in the country.

Who is being protected against whom by this travel ban?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzXQ6Bu9JVI

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html

https://twitter.com/DHS_Wolf/status/1237915985476227078

Note that this technically covers "having been in Europe in the last 14 days", not merely "coming directly from Europe". Enforcement of the latter is much easier, of course, and I'm sure some people will manage to sneak through by lying or customs not asking.

Also note that it's the Schengen zone, thus excluding both UK and Ireland.

Finally, it only excludes foreign nationals. US citizens should be able to return, but there's nothing stopping them from being tested and/or quarantined on return.

This is late, but still necessary. But still not enough. Travel WITHIN the US must be restricted as well. Overly strict measures now can still help bend the curve -- the economy will recover.

Seems like this is too little too late, cats already out of the bag in the US.

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.

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.

Also, it ignores the deliberately inaccurate case numbers in the US :-/

but it won't limit the amount of infected people in the USA on its own

I never said it would. By stopping flights, you're removing one potential source of new infections.

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.")

The presumption is you have better tracking over your own citizens than people coming in.

> 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.

> Ugh, USA is at the moment likely on level with Europe.

Probably not true, as we don't have 1000 deaths yet. Though, give it two weeks, and we'll easily have caught up (to where Europe is today).

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.

> but there are likely hundreds of other pneumonia-related deaths going on right now who might well be undiagnosed covid19.

Let's just throw around blatant speculation, that will help.

Speculation aside that is extremely unlikely to be the case for a variety of clinical reasons

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22553193

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.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de...

>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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/conspiracy...

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.

I have to agree. you may as well ground all flights 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

no that isn't required for the travel ban to reduce the extent of the damage

> 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.

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.

What are you talking about.

What do you propose be done instead of a travel ban?

A bad idea doesn't stop being a bad idea just because of the absence of alternatives.

Suddenly everyone is an armchair president, virologist, and strategist.

No, shutting down the travel from a country with an outbreak that is not contained is not a bad idea.

Stop politicizing this matter and either trust your government or go to your bunker.

Everyone the past week has been plain fearmongering and it's disgusting.

1. Restrictions on internal travel

2. Isolation for those exposed or showing symptoms

3. Paid time off work for people who can't do their jobs in isolation, to make sure people report exposure and symptoms

4. Suspension of public gatherings

Some of these are being done voluntarily and/or by local governments, but that's very patchy.

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.

So your argument is, because the travel ban doesn’t have a big impact it’s not flattening the curve?

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.

The signaling serves a purpose though.

It's more about slowing the progress to spread out the number of infected over time.

As others have commented the goal at this point is curve flattening.

What is "flattening" in this case? it's attempting to limit the peak concurrent cases. There will likely not be a hugely significant reduction in total cases, but that isn't the goal.

The reason this is important is because no matter where you are, healthcare systems have a finite limit to the number of people they can treat at once, and if you exceed that you'll get a massive increase in mortality - both due to "survivable". cases not being treated, as well as unrelated medical events that don't get treated because there isn't capacity, e.g. you have a stroke, but there's no ED or ICU beds available.

All those panicking on the account of economic downturn need to remember that the US need not run faster than the bear, economically, it only needs to run faster than the other guy. Which it will. For starters, the US has 16% of population over the age of 65, compared to e.g. 21% in Germany, 22% in Italy and 20% in France. Population density is much lower here. There are 2.5x ICU beds per capita as well, and more diagnostic equipment, too. A lot fewer people use public transport. Strong containment measures were also taken _earlier_ in the infection cycle than e.g. in Italy.

I mean, sure there's some well publicized incompetence at CDC and FDA, that happens, but to say that the US is _more fucked_ than e.g. continental Europe is just not in alignment with reality.

Later this week the improved test kits should arrive en masse, and then we'll see how bad the situation is. Right now it's just pure conjecture and panic.

I am beginning to strongly suspect that supply chain disruption caused by government decisions is going to cause way more damage to the world than this virus ever could have on its own. I think more people making these decisions could benefit from a good deep reading of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations".

I'm certain most government knows the economic consequences will be pretty severe. However, given the panic this has already created in public, and much higher mortality rate than seasonal flu, they cannot simply ride it out.

I'm sure they have weighed their options, and have opted to take more certain shorter term hit vs gamble with uncertain longer term hit.

immunesystem can also kill. in fact, one of the ways covid19 kills is through cytokine storm, a immune overreaction.

I don't understand why people seem so sure this is not a case of social immune overreaction.

Don't underestimate how costly it is to society to have a bunch of people die. Not taking this seriously will kill a lot more people than taking it seriously.

The worst case of the virus is around 2% of people die, mostly elderly. The worst case of "taking it seriously" is an economic collapse in which a double-digit percentage of people die because global supply chains have fallen apart and there is no longer enough food to feed everybody.

It seems most of the analysis of these decisions is only looking at the benefits and not the costs; it's impossible to make rational decisions that way.

Unfortunately, too little, too late, indeed. Too late for obvious reasons - handling a crisis in a reactive way and with a serious delay is levels of magnitude more difficult than to prevent one in the first place. Too little, because IMO travel restrictions should have been set up much earlier and, more importantly, much wider than China and Europe (i.e., Schengen Area - BTW, excluding UK is ridiculous: viruses don't care about politics, do they?). By the time people realized all seriousness of the situation, there have been 100s and even 1000s of known cases in countries like Japan and South Korea. As far as I know, travel from those areas has not been restricted at the time. I certainly understand that all that implies a huge global economic and mobility impact. However, I believe that people's health and well-being is incomparably much more important than any potential economic, lifestyle and other adverse effects from making such hard decisions. Having enough information, advice and warnings from health professionals and scientists at the time, not limiting international travel (as the very major channel of this viral transmission) early enough and comprehensively enough is extremely irresponsible, whereas doing so would have been an act of true leadership.

I see loads of people saying that we're beyond containment, and they're correct. However, it does slow infection rates to some degree. That allows us the time to try to learn more about how it behaves, how repeated cases impact people who aren't currently affected as much, and find ways to combat it. That's a positive.

Does this mean with a round trip, you could be allowed to fly to Europe and be trapped there?

Edit: apparently not, looks like it just applies to foreign nationals https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting...

In my experience, airports have been pretty good about checking for potential issues like that and warning passengers at check-in.

That experience doesn't include American airports though, so YMMV.

I see in some places it says this includes cargo / shipping. Is that true?

Watched the broadcast live, yes it includes cargo shipments. Something tells me the markets are going to react badly to that one

yea I'm guessing the market will be all red again tomorrow.

Safe bet, it feel almost 3.75% after hours right after the announcement.

Ports are basically already at a standstill.

I personally feel this policy will get altered as the markets tank further.

Forget markets: we make drugs here they need there and vice versa.

Including cargo doesn't make much sense to me. Did they include a justification for this?

In contrast, the CDC's take is that "in general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures." -- https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html

Broadcast didn't give any rationale, maybe they're concerned about the ship crews being carriers?

What cargo it does and doesn't cover isn't really clear from the announcement. What Trump says often doesn't completely match what the policy turns out to be. When agencies release the actual rules we will know more. I wouldn't be surprised if cargo only meant air cargo.

S&P 500 Futures are already down 3%

This isn't just about COVID-19. This is economic warfare.

You mean economic suicide?

They walked back the cargo restrictions: https://twitter.com/AnaSwanson/status/1237921160500830208

Honestly given how long a cargo ship takes from the EU to the USA and given that the crew of ships has basically no contact with the cargo crates this makes no sense at all...

The only think I can come up with is that this will allow Trump to show how bad it is that the USA is so much international dependent for certain goods and use that then to push through regulations to enforce more local production. But if it's really that it's quite crazy.

A normal travel ban on the other side will slow/reduce/eliminate cross infection between the EU and the USA which can be helpful to slow the spread. But then from all what I can tell it might be at a point where the slowing of the spread caused by EU/USA cross infection doesn't matter due to many more local sources of infection... Well we will see. At least during the ban he can't really put the blame of any increase onto the EU anymore as travel was cut.

Futures are already way down. I am almost debating staying home tomorrow just to trade. But as other posters pointed out, he seems to have mispoken.

Looks like they backtracked on that one https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12379246581854699...

yes just heard that on CNN

Canada will go $$$!

That seems to be the news.

I suspect that Monday will shortly be the second largest drop in absolute terms after tomorrow. We might even see tomorrow crack the top 10 in percentage terms.

Yes, it's strange that a lot of articles don't seem to be mentioning that. Here's the relevant section of the address: https://youtu.be/pdO2HEtv92c?t=105

> And these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.

Trump said "these restrictions will not only apply to the tremendous amounts of cargo..."

but DHS is now clarifying that it doesn't apply to cargo, and the order itself doesn't mention cargo[1].

So who knows?

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

It's pretty clear that Trump misread his statement. In more ways than just that one.

Joe Rogan has a guess on his podcast recently that is an expert. This virus spreads through air very easily. Huge numbers of the virus develop in the throat before symptoms appear. A person sitting at the front of the bus, can infect people many rows back.

The takeaway. Avoid all crowded places. Buses, Stores, Metro. And places that recirculate air, such as cruise ships, airplanes.

It will come like a wave, many many people will get infected at once, quickly. 1-3% will die. Eventually virus will run out of people not already immune to it, and the spread will subside.

Too little, too late.

Most of Australia's external cases seem to be coming from the US (e.g. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson), which indicates tens of thousands of undiagnosed incidences there (even accounting for selection bias).

Urgent social distancing seems to be the best approach to maintaining a functional health system now.

Why is the U.K. not included? This is so weird; it's such a mess in the UK too.

Excluding the UK hints that this is, at least in part, politically motivated. In terms of risk the UK is no different to other European countries. We are certainly not immune to coronavirus, and there are currently no restrictions on travel between the UK and the continent.

UK (and Ireland) are outside Schengen.

Even if they don't restrict it to British passport holders travelling to the USA, it's still arguably easier to screen for the virus through one departure point than, say, 30.

There are many more flights terminating in the UK than any other European country. Plus, American students studying abroad in the UK have yet to return home.

These seem like arguments for including the UK in the flight ban.

Trump likes Boris Johnson.

I’m honestly not sure there’s anything more to it than that.

That is bizarre. As of today, the UK has 459 cases and the US has 1311. The UK population is approximately 20% of the US population so on a per capita basis coronavirus is more prevalent in the UK than in the US. The optics on this are horrible and will be construed as showing more of a concern with political theater than evidence based decision making.

I wonder. UK has Assange and 5G cards to play. I am willing to agree that move was more political than virus-based.

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1237941455693533184

The travel restriction applies to foreign nationals who have been in 26 European countries with open borders agreements, in the last 14 days.

UK is not included because it has never been a part of Schengen ("26 European countries"), which is targeted for refusal to impose travel restrictions.

Wouldn't that make UK the next hotspot? People will travel to and from UK to get to USA. Unless UK restricts travel from the rest of Europe.

Not that this ban makes a lot of sense, but not including the UK makes even less sense, considering they've already reported 400 cases (compared to the ~1,200 in the U.S.)

edit: to be fair, maybe the administration would've preferred to just ban travel from Italy. But I'm guessing it's not possible to restrict travel from just one member of the EU.

And the UK is already the most popular destination in Europe for Americans. ~50% greater than #2 France.

I've no idea why other than language.

https://www.statista.com/chart/18742/most-popular-destinatio...

I'm sure it has nothing to do with Trump owning golf courses in the UK.

Also doesn't make considering that Heathrow is a major hub for Europeans to travel to Europe.

Only reasoning I can see is political - UK did Brexit. For limiting the spreading this seems like a weird exception.

UK is already a hotspot. 100 confirmed cases in London (as of 11 Mar) means we should expect 10x that in practice. They just started later than some other countries.

The ban is for people who have been in the Schengen zone within the last 14 days, not just for direct arrivals from those states.

Closing the gate after the cows have already gotten out.

Generally it is about slowing the cows.

More like closing the gate so the coyotes don't keep attacking your cows.

Except there are already dozens of coyotes inside the fence.

Exactly. Easier to hunt and kill the interlopers if you can prevent more from coming in.

Without far more serious containment measures within the United States, this is a meaningless move. A dribble of people coming in from the EU when it's already in dozens of US states isn't going to meaningfully change the numbers.

If you had to fight 5 coyotes or 10, which would you choose?

There's every reason to believe the number of coyotes is similar on both sides of the fence.

Still not a reason to let more coyotes in.

might as well let them all in right

It's not even that. Can coyotes double in number every 5 days?

5 days? It’s closer to 2 or 3 in the US and some other countries.

I think the analogies have run their course.

Are we calling disease victims coyotes now?

Analogies serve a descriptive purpose to highlight common characteristics

They can be purposely interpreted on the basis of their obvious uncommon characteristics but that is very unproductive

Analogies can also be used to dehumanize victims. It's pretty unproductive to refer to people as vermin, coyotes, animals, etc. Unless you're trying to "highlight common characteristics."

A knife can be used to murder but if you point that out to the chef discussing technique in the kitchen, then you are not adding useful information to the conversation.

It's entirely appropriate to tell the chef he's about to cut off his thumb.

You're not an expert and you're spouting xenophobic bullshit. Take the L.

Which would be relevant in a discussion about technique.

Murder and knife crime discussions would not be.

A knife can be used for those things, but when discussing knives in cooking it makes no sense to talk about those topics.

Likewise in a discussion wherein the example of the farmer trying to protect the herd from a predator by closing the fence after the predator is already inside the farm - it is not the selection of predator animal used in the example which is the topic at hand. The example is used to illustrate the futility of the act. It does not mean that the government is a farmer. It does not mean the people are farm animals. Farm animals do not elect their farmers. Farmers do not have 3 branches and an independent judiciary or a legislature. Getting into these aspects of the comparison make no sense whatsoever. Likewise getting into the specifics of the coyote - patient zero comparison also serves no purpose. Coyotes have 4 legs and a snout. Humans don't have snouts, we have noses. Discussing all of this is not productive at all.

Also what xenophobic thing have I discussed? I am pointing out the fact that the comment you were replying to used an analogy - which is a linguistic device intended to draw a comparison. There are many phrases and figures of speech like "fox in the hen house" and "bull in a China shop" or "frog in the well". These phrases are never intended to compare the person to an actual fox or bull or frog.

Fun fact: Rand Paul today is calling undocumented persons requesting COVID-19 assistance "non-persons."

See what dehumanizing analogies results in? Congratulations.

Containment has already failed. That's why COVID-19 was declared pandemic.

Governments, and their public health employees in particular, should be switching to management, mitigation, triage, and treatment now. The assumption is that everybody will get it. The goal now is to ensure that a person occupying an ICU beds will be treated and recovered by the time the next patient needs to be admitted into it.

Issuing more extensive travel bans now are driving in the rear-view mirror instead of keeping eyes on the road ahead. It's already here, and spreading in the community.

First priority is viable testing. You can't manage what you can't detect.

Then it's like controlling a nuclear chain reaction with irregularly-shaped fuel in a randomly-configured reactor. You want to eventually consume all the dangerously radioactive fuel, but you don't want a runaway reaction and core meltdown either. So you stick control rods and moderator fluids and neutron reflectors in as needed to control the rate of the reaction, based on your monitoring, and just keep doing it until all the unreacted fuel is gone. And the whole time, people are dropping dead from the radiation. But then the reaction finally burns itself out, and you can breathe easy again, then reflect upon your failures to revise your plans for the next one.

The federal response has already failed. Now is the time for lots of smart people, who can adapt quickly, to implement ad hoc measures at the local level, based on local conditions, and draw on their public health emergency budgets, that hopefully weren't cut or raided already, and their preparedness efforts, that hopefully actually exist.

Honest question, is the government allowed to prevent US citizens from returning to the US?

Generally speaking, no. But there are edge cases.

No, and they're not. It applies to foreign nationals (i.e. non citizens). They can, however, enforce a quarantine when citizen returns.

I don't think so, for reasons of both national and international law.

However, the US is not necessarily obliged to allow any particular vessel into the country.

Kinda useless as people can fly to Mexico sneak in thru San Diego. I can't believe in 2020 we still don't have a simple and effective reusable respirator, which evaporates all aerosols and turns them into safe to breathe vapors. I also think the ban now is good, but 30 days will not be enough as things are exponentially getting worse. Even if we reach the infliction point, this is not gonna end in 30, 60, or even 90 days.

The link should be changed to: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting...

..for official government info, and not a speech by an orange dude or news sites hungry for clicks.

Official proclamation here https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

unpopular opinion: personally I'm not optimistic that any good lesson will come out of covid19 outbreak.

every recent viral outbreak seem to have generated more and more overreaction that will not only seriously bring in the economic crash that so many have been asking for but also generate resistance to actually serious future outbreaks.

India has suspended all casual travel (based on type of visa) to India from all countries.

One of the latest positive cases was an individual who traveled from USA. He might now have spread it to a cab driver, his family and now their circles (school, offices) have possible exposure. :/

Given that he is one of the people who was not tested in the USA, and he has to be isolated here now, how many people like him might be spreading it far and wide in the USA? :(

hey mods, the link should be changed to the white house proclamation, news sites are having some trouble with accuracy.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...

This is insane. What are the chances of this happening for Asia? I'm currently in Asia and it would be unfortunate to not be able to return home.

We're okay for now. Im in SE asia and i think im in an okay place to wait things out if necessary.

I don't see them restricting the rest of asia specifically unless they close it ALL down.

I could see them closing the borders completely if things continue to progress.

US is closer in blood to Europe and it shut down travel form Europe. Asia would be an easy/quick call for this administration.

Why haven't they done it in Asia yet then since Coronavirus originated from and is more severe there?

Excluding China (which they wisely banned early) and South Korea (one city daegu is the center and majority of infection) there is only japan with 639 cases. Europe has close to 20,000 cases.

But if an Asian country’s cases quickly spikes, pretty sure Asia will be shut down in travel to US

What's the endgame for the pandemic? Assume all governments act more-or-less correctly; people self quarantine, companies switch to remote work, etc. When does the world get back to normal? In two years after a vaccine is developed? This summer? Ever?

1. Limit the infection rate as much as possible for the next 1-2 years.

2. Develop a cure (vaccine or therapy).

3. Return to our normal way of life.

4. Massively revamp our preparations for the next one.

If it doesn't have the power to re-infect (which isn't known yet), then once herd immunity is achieved, things should return somewhat to normal.

The UK exemption is logical. The UK immigration systems are linked and accessible by the US. This is why the trusted-traveller program could be extended to cover the UK with an additional registration.

So the US immigration side knows all details of people connecting via the UK to the US so their pre-screening is effective. This includes how they got to the UK.

From what I read in WSJ, it's not a ban on travel by anyone, only on Europeans (whatever that comes to be defined as). Anyone found any more clarification? In one case that might mean the cessation of flights altogether, in the other case some flights still might fly?

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting...

(In the USA) Is this going to accomplish anything?

The virus is already here and has been spreading out-of-control for quite a while now. The only reason the numbers are still so low here is the incredibly low number of tests being done.

No. We need internal controls and a national emergency declared.

Deaths are also much lower in the US.

Only vs. China, Iran and Italy. We're within a factor of two (that is, about 5-6 days) of everyone else. A 5-6 day head start is not enough window to save ourselves with a travel ban.

And just like Italy went from "contained" to a country-wide lockdown in the space of a week, so will we at this point. Those tens of thousands of cases are incubating right now and will emerge in the coming days.

This travel ban does nothing.

>Only vs. China, Iran and Italy.

What are you on about? We have fewer deaths than far more countries than that (France and Spain for instance) and per capita we are doing even better.

The US has fewer deaths than the following countries per capita:

Italy, Iran, China, S. Korea, Spain, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Albania, Lebanon, Netherlands, Belgium, Panama, Ireland, Iraq, Bulgaria, Japan, Australia, UK

Country Population and coronavirus numbers can be pulled here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

>> Only vs. China, Iran and Italy.

> What are you on about? We have fewer deaths than far more countries than that

You edited out the second sentence. The full quote is:

Only vs. China, Iran and Italy. We're within a factor of two (that is, about 5-6 days) of everyone else.

which is accurate.

Again not even close, France for instance has a death rate 10x ours per capita, that's gonna take way more than 5-6 days.

The statement is inaccurate any way you slice it. Why use incomplete information when more is available?

He didn't say per capita.

The statement was accurate. It may not be a useful metric, but it was an accurate one.

> He didn't say per capita.

But it's also not the case when looking only at absolute numbers either. I would also argue that per capita is implied because it's the only way you can really make that comparison.

The lack of testing must be depressing the death numbers here too.

I’m not sure this is true, as the deaths from coronavirus are distinguishable based on their clinical features, as I understand it (e.g., the chest X-ray of a COVID-19 patient is readily identifiable)

Nobody is giving chest x-rays to older people here who have died, apparently of pneumonia.

I'm not a clinician, but getting to the diagnosis of pneumonia usually involves imaging, as I understand it:

https://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0601/p1299.html

We're kinda going around in circles here.

In order to not significantly undercount the number of coronavirus deaths attributed to other causes in the US, there would need to be wide-spread testing here... which there isn't.

Imaging (by the way, you're referencing tests on live patients not dead ones) could be used as another kind of coronavirus test, though an extremely inefficient one, so probably is essentially un-used. Anyway, for pneumonia I believe we're talking about x-rays which is poor at distinguishing coronavirus (see link). Not to mention all of this is brand new. So approximately zero Radiologists are trained and using radiology in a clinical setting to diagnose coronavirus in people who have apparently died of pneumonia.

It stops new vectors. At this point the world is not trying to stop it spreading anymore, but slowing the rate of spread to not overwhelm healthcare.

Is external travel a significant input of new vectors compared to internal travel?

It certainly helps, it’s easier to control, and has a smaller impact on most people’s lives so more easily accepted. It’s not the most effective but other factors have to be considered, including social unrest. It seems a sensible decision IMO

That doesn't answer the "significant" part, I think. It's an easy decision for the reasons you mention, but that doesn't mean it has a significant impact.

Depending on how spread goes, it would be easier to ban internal travel after banning international travel than going 0 to 100% ban in one swoop. Don’t underestimate that the damage of social unrest can easily surpass the potential damage of the virus. Remember public policies deal with people with emotions, not robots.

This would make more sense if the travel ban was bidirectional. But as you said, a lot depends on how things are progressing, which we don't actually know in the US due to poor monitoring. Which is why I said it's not clear if this is a step that will make any significant impact, although to your point it might work as theater either way.

>it certainly helps, it’s easier to control, and has a smaller impact on most people’s lives

it has quite a lot of significant costs, in particular on the airline industry and business travel which is smaller in number but pretty important. And given that community spread is going to be a far bigger issue this ban is nonsensical.

Seems like many companies are already curtailing or banning business travel (especially international), so this might not be too much of a change.

A little, not a lot. On the very pessimistic side, it will at least convince all the casual travelers who go "ooo look at the cheap airfare! I'm sure I'll be fine" from booking/traveling. Overall this will have a very chilling effect on travel, even to non-targeted regions.

However, we do already have the virus in the USA. So it's not suddenly going to go away because of this proclamation.

it will at least convince all the casual travelers who go "ooo look at the cheap airfare! I'm sure I'll be fine" from booking/traveling

I don't think it'll have such an effect on Americans since they are exempt from the ban. But now they're guaranteed to have more room to stretch out on the plane.

But you know what would have such an effect? If the government just came out and said "We strongly recommend that you cease all non-essential overseas air travel, including vacations"

No! This will do nothing. How are people on HN asking this? You all know math, right?!

The healthcare system is at risk of being overwhelmed by an exponential function. That means, to a first approximation, nothing matters except the last doubling.

Discussion questions: How does this policy, implemented now, affect the time span of the last doubling of COVID cases in the US? Does it do fuck all? Why, or why not?

It was refreshing in Feb to visit a National Park without have 5 Chinese buses pull along side you.

Sorry I just had a good laugh at this. Pretty dark humor in these times... but that just sounds great.

Does anybody know how temporary work visas are handled? I’m on an L1-B and thankfully rebooked my flights 2 weeks ago when in a business trip to Germany (in anticipation of something like this).

Edit: I’m back in the US with my wife and kids, wasn’t clear enough above.

People from the UK who have holidays planned in the US would be better of with the UK being included in the ban, because they would then be able to get refunds for their flights etc.

Why is none of this mentioned on travel.state.gov ?

Is none of this official yet?

All travel to Europe’s Schengen area according to Homeland’s announcement.

You can still fly from the UK, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia.

This might hit those airlines the greatest, we might see some of them file for bankruptcy besides flybe

How is this going to help? They can get in from Africa, Canada, Mexico, India? Ban them all later???

The ban is on those who have traveled to Europe in the past 14 days.

Unilateral amateurism is not how things should be done.

Look at Singapore for how things _should_ be done.

My brother is stuck in Europe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552902

Thanks - though I think they added a 14 day period that he will need to self quarentine

I know people will try to come up with all sorts of edge cases to figure out how to get from Europe to the US, but the fact is if you lie about where you’ve been you will likely end up in federal prison. Don’t try it, wait 30 days.

Chances of Europe reciprocating?

Social distancing may be effective

Like a, “You can’t fire me because I quit,” situation?

This is an evil generation. I see it in their eyes.

How many stocks (and which) did the Trump-Kushner Crime family have time to short in prep for this?

The UK exception seems weird. Is Trump really playing geopolitical / diplomacy games in this situation?

From the NYT article:

"He [Trump] said he would instruct the Treasury Department to “defer tax payments without interest or penalties for certain individuals and businesses negatively impacted.”

Why deferments for businesses? Don't they only pay tax on profits?

Probably is targeted more at small businesses who might have trouble getting all of their bookkeeping and records in order in time to file in a few weeks. If this somehow benefits large corporations, they will no doubt take full advantage of the situation.

It’s an interest free loan without the hassle of doing much paperwork.

On last year/quarter's profits, which they might need for opex now.

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 will become a more major hot spot for the virus than other locales. It will spread rapidly and the supply hoarding and sad state of our medical system will mean that in a few months, other nations will be rejecting flights from the US.

It's a prediction, a guess, but there are aspects of our culture that just makes it seem very likely. I'm not going to make any more predictions than the idea that we'll have more cases per capita than any other developed nation.

It's be interesting when I'm proven incorrect over time.

There are lots of individualists that will flout advice, but there's also lots of people that will isolate themselves in quite a paranoid fashion.

I think there's more of the latter.

More or less doesn't matter. It's a classic case of "one person can ruin it for everyone", which is why in many countries there is strict enforcement rather than just recommendations.

It isn't a classic case of one person can ruin it for everyone. When I choose not to go to the bar, the guy at the bar that ignored the advice about not going out in public still doesn't infect me.

So less dramatically: individuals can (and will!) reduce their exposure to infected people that make poor choices.

Of course the more people that do the right thing the better, but it isn't a situation where the outcome is controlled just by the worst actors.

Unless you hermetically seal yourself from the outside world, you are still at risk. Yes that risk can be reduced, but as more and more people are affected, your own chances go up exponentially, no matter what measures you take.

Yes, it's the value of the exponent that I am talking about. Smaller is, uh, exponentially, better than larger.

(I'm being sarcastic, but changing the exponent is (literally) what all the public health messaging about flattening the curve is about)

(to be completely pedantic, flattening the curve is about changing the base. The exponent is time.)

No, the equation is (currently infected)^(rate*time).

Community mitigation changes the rate.

Okay, I think you're right here. But then why when I calculate compound interest, it's (1+rate)^time ?

The infection is continuously compounding. This video is hand wavy, but it shows the relationship:

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

> Unless you hermetically seal yourself from the outside world, you are still at risk.

By that logic, unless you hermetically seal yourself from the outside world, you are still putting everyone else at risk.

And in either case, by that same logic, isolation apparently doesn't matter, so might as well still go to the bar.

Just eat an apple a day...

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 around public spaces, like the park, cafes, the city square, and public transport. Americans tend to spend little time in restaurants, whereas Europeans relax and enjoy the meal, thus increasing their exposure time.

Think of the areas in the US that seen the worst outbreaks. Seattle, the Bay Area, New York, Boston. These are the metros, where the average resident is least likely to live a typical middle-American lifestyle. San Francisco in many ways is closer to Copenhagen than it is to Jacksonville.

Overall, social distancing is probably easier for Americans because our way of life already involves a good deal of social distance to begin with.

I mean there was literally a guy on the post from yesterday talking about how we're all paranoid and he's going to enjoy "exploring Boston and eating out while the lines are short".

Thats probably the attitude that spreads it, yes. But that doesn't change a massivie amount of Americans don't live in these hotspots.

Yeah some people are going to take advantage of cheap flights and small crowds. The thinner crowds is the point though. it still achieves the objective of lowering the R value.

I bought an annual unlimited longhaul flight pass on AirAsia for ~$150 USD, still have to pay taxes and airport charges. One return flight home and it pays for itself. Will see how that turns out, but is very much bargain hunting time for the brave.

Also traffic is great now. One good thing to come out of this is that governments might see the huge infrastructure benefits from just a small increase in remote workers.

https://newsroom.airasia.com/news/2020/2/29/eng-aaunlimitedp...

> Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies

No they don't. No one in NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, ... have big garages to stockpile supplies and most of the US lives in those big cities with apartments without garages.

In the suburbs they do but that's a minority of the population.

That is correct, but most people dont live in cities here. As of 2010, the top 10 cities had 24MM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_i...

People in the suburbs do have big garages (think long island vs manhattan)

How does a garage help? Many people living in urban areas in Europe have a basement. And even those who don't shouldn't have issues storing 2 weeks worth of food in their houses or apartments. Fridge space is probably the only restriction for that.

Majority of US population lives in the suburbs. Roughly 30% live in urban areas and many of them would have garages or basements. For example, my town is considered urban and all the houses have garages.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/11/data-most-american-neig...

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...

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. Urban county population rose 13% since 2000 and the population in suburban and small metro counties went up 16%, growth rates somewhat higher than in the 1990s.

It's hidden in plain sight: you mention "Boston, San Fransisco, and Seattle" in the same breath as NYC, but numbers-wise those are all pretty small and you're leaving out not only their suburbs but also the LA, Chicago, DFW and Houston areas which all have considerable amounts of suburbs and single family living, and hold almost 40M people alone...

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.

Common most of the houses in outer richmond, sunset, ingleside, ... have multiple in-law units and converted garages. The cost of living is too expensive in those cities.

> No one in NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, ... have big garages to stockpile supplies

I think most of San Francisco by area is zoned "RH-" (Residential Housing), and most of that RH- area is RH-1 or RH-1D (single family). Most of the homes in those regions have lots of space.

We're not just talking about Zuck's mansion either, plenty of homes in the Sunset or other West SF areas that have that kind of room.

Friend of mine went on a walkabout. Camping in his van and decided to live off just what was in his food bin. Basically a short half full rubber maid container. Lasted him three weeks.

Plenty of houses in outer richmond, sunset, ingleside, ... have multiple in-law units and converted garages. The cost of living is too expensive.

It sounds like you've never been outside of a city in Europe and never been to a city in the US? Urban population in the EU in 2018 is 76% while 82% for the same year in the US according to The World Bank.

> and never been to a city in the US?

Have you? Most of the US urban population in the US fits the points of the OP:

- Very few people use public transportation regularly (they use cars, in the cities, yes)

- Most people have private back yards (the infamous "American suburbs", where 50% of Americans live, count towards the urban population you mention)

- Many more meals are take-out or drive-thru

- More Americans use e-commerce for shopping than Europeans

In some places this is relevant, in other places such as Scandinavia and Germany, other than public transportation it is not.

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!

I've lived in both as well and I don't agree. I concede that I misunderstood the takeout point though.

> you are missing the people have big back yards in the US EVEN inside city

hardly.

Guys, you are missing the point - these stereotypes, however true they might have been (or not), are over currently for Europe. Restaurants are empty or closed, people limit their social interaction and overall exposure to minimum. It doesn't matter much if we speak about Sweden or Italy or anything in between.

What will happen or won't in US or Europe is not anymore dependent on these behaviors.

Lol. I'm in Germany. And lol, just lol. No one here is doing jack.

I’d say the norm is to have a house and backyard with that. The three V’s.

I don’t think I know anyone who haven’t ended up in a house eventually tbh.

Not sure how the backyard argument is relevant anyway. It's not like that makes not spreading the disease that much easier. Public transport is certainly a risk. But I'm not even sure if e-commerce helps. Going to Walmart at 1am and using self checkout is probably much safer than receiving your delivery from someone who might be infected and visits several hundred homes a day.

The vast majority of home deliveries are drop-at-the-door with no human interaction, fwiw.

Your stat does nothing to counter the OPs argument.

Got a citation for those numbers? Another poster claims that the US suburb population alone is 175M, and that's roughly half the country right there. Add in the rural population (46M), and 82% urban seems not even remotely correct.

Other than the citation I gave?

> The World Bank.

Here's some direct links though:

- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat... - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...

Urban population includes suburbs. That 82% breaks down into 53% suburban (175M, per other poster) and 29% urban (98M).

Urban population in Europe also includes suburbs. Yes, there's less sprawl but enough people in Europe living in urban settings have backyards and reasonably large houses.

Might be they're counting suburban as urban.

> Overall, social distancing is probably easier for Americans because our way of life already involves a good deal of social distance to begin with.

While that's true, behavior trumps lifestyle I think. I had a dentist appointment scheduled for this morning in San Francisco. I called my dentist office and explained that my wife has some mild-flu symptoms and asked if we should reschedule. They said that's since I don't have symptoms myself it's not necessary to postpone the appointment. That may happen in Jacksonville too.

You think that should be cancelled?

omg yes! The dentist's going to stick their face right in his! after having stuck their face right into a bunch of other patients! and then they'll stick their face into a few more patients! It sounds like the perfect breeding ground. Even if I wasn't sick, I'd want to cancel for that alone!

Yeah but they use protections like masks, gloves. I think it's reasonable to assume that a dentist's office likely know better than you about how to minimize the risk. They have motivation in not ruining their business by being a source of local outbreak.

> 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.

Americans all gather together in the same room 5 days a week to work. They also have less protections for paid sick days so you will have min wage mcdonalds workers coming in sick and coughing on your burgers.

> Very few people use public transportation regularly.

Stopping the CTA would virtually shut down Chicago.

>Americans have big garages to stockpile supplies, which means less trips to the store

This is FUD. That isn't where you risk getting sick. The countries with the most effective response to COVIR-19 doesn't even try to stop everyday shopping or movement in cars at all.

>In Europe by contrast, much more of life revolves around public spaces, like the park, cafes, the city square, and public transport.

You don't get sick by being in a park or city square with someone else. More FUD. Please do some reading on the appropriate measures and what actually constitutes a risk of infection.

From what I've read, China tries to get people to go grocery shopping only once per week. They are the only ones who appear to manage to get the infection rate from 1.3x down to 0.3x in the past days.

Interesting. Once a week was status quo in the suburb I grew up in (west of Chicago), is that not normal elsewhere?

We buy milk and bread almost daily.

On the other hand here in Italy

- we have a better healthcare system than is US (better as in public and for everyone)

- we own the most cars per capita in the west and are second in the world, public transport wasn't a big factor in this pandemia here

- food is much more controlled and we have a tradition of home made, home grown food, that doesn't require to go to the supermarket

- things are closer so trips are shorter and you can shop at many non packed smaller shops

- we react better to panic and are not armed

- infection has spread in small cities in the country where houses are larger, they have more storage, don't use public transport and social distancing in theory was easier

All in all, there are many ways to look at this

> Many more meals are take-out or drive-thru

Wait until all the coronavirus infected hourly workers, who can't get treated because of a lack of healthcare and who have to continue going to work so they can pay rent, infect everyone through the take-out food :)

Only time will tell, but fairly aggressive measures are already being taken in California and Washington where the cases are only in the hundreds, and many other states are following close behind when they have few to no cases. One thing even many Americans don’t properly appreciate is the degree to which most things are actually run at the state and local level. So far the federal dysfunction has not stopped the states and cities from moving. If that stays the case, the US may be okay.

One other factor in the US favor, it’s extremely low population density compared to the rest of the world. The US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all similarly low density and in this specific case likely to benefit from that.

fairly aggressive measures are already being taken in California and Washington

Such as??

I'm living California, outside a major city. I don't see anything.

Washington has just, for example, banned all events with over 250 people in them for the three most affected counties.

Cities and counties in CA had been doing the same with different thresholds. Which meant an NBA game was going to be played without fans (since then, the NBA season has been suspended, which is a pretty significant measure in and of itself).

Many schools have been closing in the Seattle area, and just today the Seattle school district, and many outlying school districts closed for at least two weeks. That's a lot of school closures.

Many companies are having employees work from home wherever possible. The amount of traffic in Seattle during rush-hour is an astronomical change. There's very light traffic during rush hour in places that used to be wall-to-wall vehicles.

As someone living in the Seattle area, it feels like life has substantially changed.

All Seattle public schools closed. Northshore is already, Bellevue shortly, LW had better.

https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-03-...

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said he’s banning gatherings of more than 250 people in several counties.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/washington-state-bans-large-...

Many local businesses have soft-closed their offices at behest of city including Amazon and Microsoft.

School districts are closing down, for one. For example, my hometown's school district (Elk Grove Unified School District) shut down all campuses this week (but are apparently allowing athletic and academic team activities - i.e. sports - tomorrow): http://www.egusd.net/covid-19/

In SF-proper, it feels like a ghost town, I'll tell you that. But just outside in Berkeley, everyone's just strumming along in their cars.

Aren't all the California universities switching to online or shutting down? That's kind of aggressive, no?

Gatherings are also being shut down. Public meetings are shutting down.

What else would you have them do?

I have a few friends that teach at K-12 schools in California and they've all been told to figure out what platform they want to use to do teach remotely. Our local school district sent out an email to parents outlining an online teaching plan.

I don't know if they're all just being exceptionally prepared or if there's plans for a more widespread school shutdown here.

Bay Area, I'm wfh, my wife is wfh, all our family and friends that work for major tech companies are wfh, 85-N had no traffic at 9:30 AM this morning, we pulled our kid out of gymnastics class 2 weeks ago, we haven't been going to museums (one of which is closed, because of coronavirus), and his day care (which nominally has 12 students) was down to 7 last Friday and now 3 of those are out because of hand-foot-mouth disease. Berkeley, Stanford, and Santa Clara University have all gone remote-only and sent the students home. Stores are completely out of rice, beans, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, etc, and a bunch of people are wearing masks. I figure it's just a matter of time before we're on complete lock-down.

Schools in several major districts are shutdown for at least 14-days.

This now includes Bellevue School District (Bellevue WA).

King (Ground Zero, US), Pierce and Snohomish Counties all have a ban on any event with 250 or more people (this was declared by WA State's governor)

City council meetings are being conducted remotely.

University of Washington has moved all their classes online for the remainder of the semester.

> One other factor in the US favor, it’s extremely low population density

laughs in jersey

Not that your statement is not funny, but please do not turn hackernews into reddit

Allow me to rephrase then: while the overall population density of the US is low, we have some pretty large dense areas, including Southern California and the northeast megalopolis

Compared to similar areas elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, these areas are not dense at all. Wuhan, which you surely hadn't heard of before this crisis, is ~denser than~ nearly as dense as New York City, for example.

Is it though?

----------------------------

Wuhan Central Districts

population: 6,434,373

density: 7,242/km2

----------------------------

New York

population: 8,398,748

density: 10,715/km2

Off by a bit, sorry, edited.

"extremely low population density"

I'm not sure the average population density across the entire country is that relevant - it doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of population.

The US is actually rather an urban country - 82% live in urban areas which is more than Italy (75%):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country

Edit: Also noticed that Australia is 86% and Canada 81%!

This is actually due to the inclusion of suburbs and exurbs in the “urban” category for US, Canada & Australia.

Half of the US population lives in the suburbs (see above posters). What we would recognize as a real urban environment only accounts for less than a third of the US population (98M people).

Maybe its my UK bias - the distinction between urban and suburban doesn't seem to feature a lot in statistics here - things are often just usually "urban" (including suburbs) or "rural".

I did see a figure of about 55% of everyone in England and Wales living in suburbs - but I suspect our suburbs look pretty dense to someone from Houston or indeed Achiltibuie!

You pretty much can't compare the definition of "city" or "urban area" in different countries, so that tells you nothing.

I mean, Berlin has 3.7 million people in a city of 890 sq km. Melbourne has about 5 million people in a city of almost 10,000 km. They're incomparable, and so the urban population of Australia and Germany are incomparable. (You can play with the definitions as much as you like but you'll never be able to compare arbitrary Australian and German cities.)

Europe is a huge place and it's hard to pin it down to a single culture. The collectivism is mainly seen in northern Europe and Scandinavian countries. If you've ever been to Napoli or Sicily you wouldn't feel the same way. Feels more like Morocco sometimes.

Many parts are really not as collectivist as people seem to think. Not as collectivist as Asia at least, not even close. Individualistic tendencies are strong over there, although not as strong as in the US.

I would've thought that the closer personal contact in Southern Europe (hugging/kissing for greetings) would spread it faster. But if you look at infection rates, most more Northern countries now look pretty similar to how it spread in Italy 1-2 weeks ago. So not sure if culture actually plays a role.

I guess it's all down to the economy, business travel spread it a lot. that's why areas with strong economies seem to be affected more than others (at least in Spain, Italy and Germany). Banning travel could work quite effectively for that.

>that's why areas with strong economies seem to be affected more than others (at least in Spain, Italy and Germany)

Are you saying Spain and Italy has strong economies?

By GDP Italy is #8 and Spain is #13

I said the strong parts of each country were most affected. Not saying economically strong countries more than weaker countries but stronger regions more than weaker regions.

For Italy it's the North, for Germany South & West, for Spain the regions around Barcelona & Madrid. In each case, they were hit hardest. I don't believe that this is coincidence. There are other factors, like wealth leading to more travel and general, as well as population density. But interconnection by economic activity looks to me like a major factor.

AFAIK (correct me if I am wrong), but must cases in DK, NO, SE are still brought back from Italy.

Just yesterday I listened to an interview with a medical expert, and the host asked him if he should cancel his domestic holiday plans. The host assured him that was premature.

And yet here we are the next day. The situation is evolving rapidly.

>The host assured him that was premature. And yet here we are the next day. The situation is evolving rapidly.

Meh.

Your personal risk to become infected via $generic_domestic_holidays is pretty low, but the risk to increase the overall threat-vector by allowing open flights from domestic zones is very high.

The personal assessment just differs from the supervising political assessment, while the observed/assessed situation is exactly the same. Also: be careful with "experts", whenever that label is used, you should be very wary. A "medical expert" doesn't inherently know anything about politics at scale, he just (simplification alert) knows which medication to apply when which symptoms arise.

Yeah, you need a influenza epidemic expert, all the rests are just repeating second-hand information.

Joe Rogan has had such an ad hoc expert just this week, highly recommended. A sobering cold and factual shower.

Agreed, it’s amazing the range of guests Joe Rogan has on his show. Admittedly some are more witch doctors than actual doctors but his recent conversation with Michael Osterholm was the real deal.

Even India is pausing all travel from Europe for next one month. It's not about US/India, Europe got lot of exposed cases and currently it's the best way to prevent further spreading.

Trying hard not to be political. But POTUS speech seems to make things lot worse than better along anything.

The efficacy of this travel ban is questionable (given all these exceptions such as one for UK. Can people coming from other parts just have a layover in UK and be get permission to enter the US?). But lets give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did so in good faith.

It is what's not in the speech that was very very concerning. - No mention of how / when / if people can get tested. - No mention of any plan to handle the economic situation. What happens when businesses in Tourism and restaurants run out of their runway and have to layoff people? What happens to hourly workers who get sick? - No assurance to encourage undocumented residents to go for testing if they experience symptoms. - No mention of large public events. Many local governments and private organizations are doing so in an ad-hoc ways. A consistent voice would literally save lives here.

Their team seems to be singularly focused on 'winning the narrative' or 'spinning' properly than anything else... Well, I guess this is just my opinion.

> Can people coming from other parts just have a layover in UK and be get permission to enter the US?

I believe anyone who's been to the Schengen Area in the past x days faces the ban. Excluding the UK and Ireland surely had political reasons (the UK now also has >400 cases) but it's hard to define Europe if you don't use either Schengen or EU (both of which the UK isn't a part of).

I wonder about British/Irish people.

Passports for EU citizens aren't stamped anywhere in the EU. I live in Denmark. Would the USA know if I flew to the UK, then the USA?

(I don't intend to do this.)

The details are unclear anyway. What about Schengen citizens living in the UK? I can imagine they'll generally let people in from UK and Ireland but question them about travel history and maybe proof of residence. Lying to a border agent gets you banned for life, that should be a decent deterrent.

In the end, it's not like a terrorism threat where the ones trying hardest are the ones you need to catch. Here, keeping 99% out can suffice easily, esp if the others are also questioned and are getting temperature checks.

You realize that the U.S. has probably many more infectious areas than Europe?

I don't think the people who made this decision are on Hacker News.

They certainly do have many but travelers from Europe could still introduce more infection clusters, especially in major cities.

I suspect it is trivial for the US to check who boarded flights across the world, and you left many other digital footprints (payments, cell phone activation, etc). IANAL but I believe that lying to immigration when entering the US is a pretty efficient way to get banned from entering for life.

> Would the USA know if I flew to the UK, then the USA?

I would imagine they will have you fill in a recent travel form. And make it clear that you'll be in a lot of trouble if you don't answer truthfully.

> Passports for EU citizens aren't stamped anywhere in the EU. I live in Denmark. Would the USA know if I flew to the UK, then the USA?

This kind of question is a weird one to me. It's like "oh, marijuana prohibition hasn't worked so we should tax it and regulated it".

If you're breaking the law, there's sanctions. You may or may not get caught, and you may or may not be penalised, but that imperfection doesn't decide if it's valid or not. The jails in every country have murderers in them, but murder has been illegal since time immemorial. No-one proposes that we allow murder because with the prohibition we simply wind up with people in prison.

And there's a big difference between free movement of people versus a limited funnel of people. If it's still early enough, that could make the difference between something that is containable and something that is not, and it might make the difference between ICUs that can cope with the peak and being completely overwhelmed. (However, I think the horse has already bolted on this one.)

it's a legit question which is the pillar of (software) security thinking. It's called parallel or adversarial thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_thinking

what would work in that case is take the Channel Tunnel to England, then lie about how long you've stayed in the UK. It probably wouldn't work if you have taken a flight out/in the EU in the past months as that would show up to any customs official.

We saw many people in Italy fled south by train and car in the hours before quarantine was to be imposed in parts of the north.

I wouldn't be surprised if some people in Europe are making similar "escape plans" via the UK, if they feel they need to be in the USA for some reason.

As an example: a parent of an international student, whose university in the USA has just been shut down.

Since UK isn't in Shengen don't you need to show ID on entry? Surely they record who comes in

All EU citizens (including Irish) and British citizens show a passport or national identity card when entering Britain or Ireland, or when entering the Schengen area.

The document is checked, but it is not stamped. GB/IE←→Schengen checks used to be very simple — often just a glance, no checking the chip or swiping the passport in a reader. Often it was just one or two customs people standing by the gate and looking at each document, not even with a desk. Now (since the refugee thing?) they do swipe the document on the passport-reader-machine.

I assume an electronic record is kept (at least for some period of time), and it is surely shared within the EU+GB, but I don't know if it would be shared to the USA.

(If the situation were reversed, would the USA tell the EU about American citizens who've crossed the US/Canada border using their driving license?)

> Excluding the UK and Ireland surely had political reasons

Or maybe it's because Trump owns golf resorts in both countries?

That is obviously also gonna be a reason. But I could imagine that his staff feels more comfortable with Schengen as a zone with (usually) open borders and high infection rates rather than specifying single countries. The latter would probably be harder to keep up in courts.

FWIW, without making this political, I don't even think it's the golf resorts. US and UK have very close economical links, there's a lot of business traffic. Esp by wealthy people flying NYC-London regularly. I would rather think he didn't want to affect those. I can imagine a lot of his friends would've been angry if NYC-London gets shut down. Most visitors to his resorts in Europe will be from the continent anyway. But that's obviously pure speculation.

Dublin has pre-clearing[1] arrangements for entering the US so you can do all your checks in IE. Most of the US companies registered in Europe are in the RoI/UK, which could be reason for why they exclude it. Also whether this makes sense for "containing" is a different question.

If you have ever traveled to US via Dublin before you will never want to travel from another airport after.

[1] > Dublin Airport is one of only a handful of airports outside North America that offers a US Preclearance facility. The benefit is that having cleared USCBP, passengers arriving in the US are treated as domestic arrivals, allowing them to avoid immigration queues upon arrival and pick up their bags and go. https://www.dublinairport.com/flight-information/travelling-...

>it's hard to define Europe if you don't use either Schengen or EU

The mass of land resting North of the Mediterranean sea and West of the Ural mountains from which there is no land route to America.

Ireland and the UK are not part of that "mass of land" :-)

True, but technically both are

- North of the Mediterranean sea

- West of the Ural mountains

- no land route to America

It might include lots of Canadian islands, though. Maybe specify that it needs to be on or east of the mid-Atlantic ridge as well.

If we talk about "mass of land" - and wanna split hairs :) - it does not include the ocean I guess.

Remember that UK is very close to continental Europe

Strait of Dover is just 33 km wide.

One could almost swim from one side to the other.

And there's a tunnel connecting the two, you can already go by train from France to UK.

Ireland and UK are even closer than that (about 20kms)

And they are all the same "mass of land" as in tectonic plate.

Iceland for example cannot entirely be considered Europe, the Eurasian plate cut it exactly in a half.

Anything east of the Ural mountains is also west of the Ural mountains if you travel far enough. :)

that's why we have invented the concept of "greater distance" :)

So you'd include parts of Russia and Turkey but leave out others? That's gonna be hard to define at the border.

"Europe and the UK".

Not that hard, especially when it's a decision where lives can be at stake.

> What happens when businesses in Tourism and restaurants run out of their runway and have to layoff people? What happens to hourly workers who get sick?

Well they should have accounted for this! They should work hard to get through this, not expect handouts! /s

As sad as the outcome might be death-wise, I hope this pandemic ripping through the US makes us realize how broken our systems are and how instead of spending trillions on military we should be spending money on our collective wellbeing.

Global free-as-in-beer trade for all costs a ton of money, and is good for global well-being.

Cutting waste is certainly something we need to do better, but let’s be honest about the product we’re getting (that nobody else is capable of producing much less giving away for free) for our military budget.

No need to apologise for being political. This is clearly in the realm of politics.

these containment measures are important but considering that there are no numbers on tests it really is just a distraction from the fact that no tests are being done in the US.

It makes him look like a "strong leader" in front of his base and lends an appearance of "we don't stop from drastic measures even it hurts the economy" (which he was accused of before).

Any time a talking-head goes in front of a camera, the only question that should be asked is "how many tests did we do today, yesterday? ... where is the data for it?". Without the transparency for the numbers of tests all other measures are just a distraction. Anyone who speaks about stuff before these numbers are public knowledge needs to be kicked off the air and down the street (metaphorically).

Also reporters who engage them and do not insist on extracting the numbers before continuing the conversation are complicit.

a lot of people who criticize the ban says its arbitrary, etc etc. go to the site below. you can also sort by total cases / 1m pop. US stopped travel to China while the EU did not, and you can see that in the numbers. Right now, the US has one of the lowest rates in the world: 4 per million.

If you want to call Trump for a mistake, it was not banning travel from EU sooner, when they themselves didn't ban travel to China.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The US is not testing nearly as much as other countries. Two weeks ago it has tested <500 people, as of March 11 the US has tested only 11,079 persons[1].

With this amount of testing the numbers you're referring to are completely meaningless. The number of infections is artificially kept low by limiting testing. Hundreds of thousands could be infected, the disease is growing exponentially, and there could be thousands of hospitalizations soon. I'm going so far as to say that there will be thousands of hospitalizations in the US soon and the death toll will soon climb rapidly.

For comparison, Italy has tested 60,761 people as of March 9 [2], and Germany, for instance, has started randomized testing of the population as part of the yearly random influenza testing.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing-in-us.html [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

The payroll tax holiday idea is bonkers. The people most in need of help here are hourly or gig workers who are told to stay home from work or who get sick and can't work. Paying less taxes on nonexistent wages doesn't help. It seems like the administration is more interested in propping up the markets than actually addressing the health crisis and its human costs.

Also, eliminating copays on coronavirus treatment is nice, but it's hard not to notice the glaring omission of anything to help the 9% of Americans who are uninsured.

They aren't eliminating copays on treatment. Only testing.

https://twitter.com/owermohle/status/1237922717699014658

Yeah it's clearly a token move to pretend like they're doing something. The cv19 test is free but all the other tests they will undoubtedly and necessarily run before that are not. And if you end up in the er as a poor person, you'll likely go bankrupt or take a massive hit even with insurance. That'll keep people away. Who knows how long it'll be before we have massive testing like Korea. Maybe never.

Just because CV19 is a thing now doesn’t mean the US magically has Medicare for all.

No, but it is in the nation's interest to get as many people tested as possible (assuming we can solve the pesky test kit shortage). If people aren't getting tested because they can't afford it, that hurts the country just as much as it could potentially hurt them.

It is also in the nations interest to have free healthcare for everyone, so why should this be handled differently?

Because this virus overloads every hospital where there is an epidemic.

So in your mind, Medicare for all only covers covid 19? Because that's what I'm talking about. Covering treatment for the once in a hundred years pandemic. Clearly, even that's too much for our shitty, decaying American society. In the meantime every other developed nation has a proper healthcare system while we can barely test for this due to our incompetence and shit leaders.

Woah dude, slow your roll. I was saying M4A doesn't exist in the states at this time so, insurers will still expect payment if you get treated. That's all I'm saying.

Also, do they mean SS and Medicare contributions in the payroll taxes, or just unemployment insurance?

Like if we have a health crisis that disproportionately affects people who rely on Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, taking away funding for it isn't bonkers. It's batshit insane! We should be doubling, tripling taxes in the short term on those that can pay it to make up the funding gap for testing, treatment, and surge capacity. And who better than the largest medical provider in the country, with contacts and infrastructure for directing funds to every medical provider in the country?

Are they going to cut off the water to the block when the house is burning down?

I'm all for expanding Medicare and Social Security, but to be fair the government is perfectly able to continue funding these things on a temporary basis without payroll tax receipts. Presumably a bill to freeze FICA taxes would also contain a provision for funding the expected shortfall with a transfer from the general fund or new federal debt issuance.

> It's batshit insane! We should be doubling, tripling taxes in the short term on those that can pay it to make up the funding gap for testing, treatment, and surge capacity

Taking money out of the economy by dramatically hiking taxes at this point seems _batshit insane_ to me. The government should be well equipped to absorb temporary shocks to revenue.

> The government should be well equipped to absorb temporary shocks to revenue.

Good thing the federal deficit is higher than it's ever been! No, wait, crap...

> It seems like the administration is more interested in propping up the markets than actually addressing the health crisis and its human costs.

Pretty much. Trump is openly obsessed with the Dow.

And then we have the CDC, saying they're being told to wait on Jared Kushner "doing some research".

As far as I can tell the only research he could or would be realistically doing is determining which companies stand most to profit from measures, and make sure that family and friends positions in those companies are thoroughly set up.

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.

> I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet.

I'm guessing you didn't mean this to be a double negative? In other words:

> I would be surprised if in a week or two they feel like they dodged a massive bullet

but I suspect you meant the opposite?

Correct; it's an incorrectly worded, flippant, emotional response to my view of my country's (the US) response to the crisis and not a statement that those that are/were travelling to Europe shouldn't.

This is known as “negative concord” and shows up often in colloquial English. While popularly associated with African American and Appalachian dialects, it actually occurs almost everywhere English is spoken. (E.g. Pink Floyd’s chorus, “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control”.)

Even in formal writing, double negatives are common using “nor”. Consider the sentence, “He is not satisfied at all with the recommendations of Mr. Trump, nor with those of Mrs. Clinton.” If you change “nor” to “or”, the meaning remains identical. This shows the negative “nor” reiterates rather inverts the prior negation. Note the “nor” version is no less formal or professional in tone because of its double negative.

Negative concord even has precedent in Shakespeare: “I never was, nor never will be” from Richard III.

Most would suggest avoiding negative concord in a formal writing (excepting “nor”), but colloquially it’s been part of the language for hundreds of years. In a conversational context, the line you quoted is standard English with or without the “don’t”.

That sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I've never heard negative concord in this context.

Most people would just accept it as getting confused about the number of negatives in a sentence - as indeed did the op.

Not everything is simply informal grammar; real fleshy human beings do get confused when they try complicated sentences like double negatives.

> This sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I’ve never heard negative concord in this context.

You have a misplaced trust in your instincts. The following examples of this exact double-negative construction (“...wouldn’t be surprised if ... didn’t...”) are quoted from newspapers and BBC specials:

> But the seeds have been sown and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't try, once she's feeling more confident herself, to persuade him into the deep end.

> "I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see there are a couple of days with some good news and very, very positive market news," Houge said, noting potential days of 10 percent spikes.

> "I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't lose $157,000 in taxes," Van Tuinen said.

> It was late, and I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't leave some of his audience back down the road somewhere impaled on point number 10 or 11.

Here’s a quote of John F. Kennedy using this construction in a recorded interview:

> President Kennedy: That's what I think. I would have been impeached. I think they would have moved to impeach. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't move to impeach right after this election, on the grounds that I said … and didn't do it … and let … I mean, I'd be …

I Googled these examples in five seconds. You could have too, but instead you chose to lob insults and embarrass yourself.

It's so dumb, immediate family members not applicable -- so check-in agents are now going to be in the business of examining birth certificates?

I'm guessing we're going to get a lot of these sentiments over the next couple weeks (months?), about how these restrictions are interfering with the comforts of modern life.

Let it stand as a reminder of how good we have it, and how fragile things actually are. It's a pandemic. There's going to be some bumps.

I don't know it seems like it might be dumb to make an exception that would be hard to check and thus might be hard to apply and would mean that anyone who didn't want their comforts interfered with could say "I'm an immediate family member!"

But I guess the ethical will follow the rules and be uncomfortable, and the unethical won't, as per standard operating procedure.

On Edit: Why the downvote?

The ridiculous part of this whole travel ban 3.0 is that it is totally unnecessary. If the U.S. had proper testing infrastructure, we could test every single person arriving from abroad and make them wait the 4 hours required to get a read. S. Korea has that type of testing infrastructure. We invented the darn technology. There are no excuses for the deplorable, laughable, incompetent, disgraceful (I could go on) roll out (actually lack thereof) of testing in the U.S. As best I can tell, we now (today) have capacity to test about a 1,000 samples a day? Unbelievable. Give me three water baths, any old microtiter plate fluorometer, and enough tubes and reagents and I can run 1,000 samples a day by hand.

They don't have a serological test yet. The test uses RNA extraction. So, the testing all over the world is time consuming and testing kits are expensive. I don't think this is just a US problem.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51836898

For the people that don't like clicking links:

>Nearly 20,000 people are being tested every day for coronavirus in South Korea, more people per capita than anywhere else in the world.

>The whole process from test tube to test result is about five to six hours.

You are just wrong. RNA extraction is dead simple. The basic extraction technology dates to the 1980s. The extraction reagents are (or at least very much can be) very simple ad very cheap chemicals like trizol reagent.

Then, the first positive result that you get should mean that the whole plane is at risk, after all we are talking of people that have been jammed together on the plane for some 8 hours (on the same recirculating air) and then kept (possibly also jammed together) for another 5-6 hours at the airport to wait for the results, that is - from what I can understand of the way the virus is transmitted - the perfect environment to diffuse the virus.

The only meaningful way I can imagine (not doable in practice) is having travelers lodged at a departure airport hotel, and be tested before taking the flight.

This (the recirculation part) is likely less tragic than it seems.

Air recilculated on the airplane goes through a HEPA filter and the whole air is exchanged every 3 minutes. HEPA filters are able to catch the virus as far as I know.

source: https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/630300-coved-19-recircul...

Testing every single person arriving from abroad wouldn't work. The test is not reliable for people still in the incubation phase, and with exponential spread being what it is there are going to be a lot of those. I don't think there's any country on the planet taking that approach; they're all either banning travel from affected countries or forcing a 14-day quarantine period on travellers from them. The American media seems to have oversold people on how powerful testing is for domestic political reasons.

Also, 4 hour turnaround testing is really hard and I don't know of anywhere other than South Korea has managed it. They basically have to process the tests on site after collecting samples to achieve that, which is no easy feat as it requires not only specialised equipment and trained staff but also a carefully set up positive pressure room to prevent sample contamination. Plus, one of the key things that makes South Korea's approach so effective is that people drive up, get a sample taken, then immediately drive home to avoid spreading the disease to anyone else rather than waiting around for results.

I haven't even seen any examples of countries with substantial travel from Europe that routinely test people who've been there recently and developed mild potential symptoms. South Korea probably could but I haven't seen any confirmation that they do; they mostly seem to be focused on contact tracing and the large local outbreak. The UK and Europe don't. Maybe China does? Again, the American media has been running stories making it sound like the fact the US isn't testing everyone with a cough and a sniffle puts them massively behind the rest of the world and confusing people about what the rest of the world is actually doing.

Imagine trying to perform TSA test procedures for terrorist activity (millions of people still removing their shoes in airports every day because one guy tried and failed to blow up his own shoes in 2001 WTF), while also trying not to spread COVID-19. Perhaps instead of pat downs they'll do interpretive dances.

The idiocracy has landed. Welcome to Stupidville, population (we can't count higher than 5).

It actually happens, in some hotels around the world, that they will demand a marriage certificate if they're sus. So an Indonesian marriage certificate is like a passport.

The most important detail that was missed, it seems, is that this doesn't go into effect until midnight on Friday 03/13.

people aren't worried about leaving, they were worried about coming back.

Is that departure time or arrival time?

The president says that clearly in his address.

However the stuff about cargo being included is really odd. As if he was freestyling rather than reading.

Other than that; I fail to see the point of this. There is already community spread in the US and the UK. The ban seems arbitrary and politicized.

> As if he was freestyling rather than reading.

Or as if he had problems reading, which we know he likely has.

Which timezone?

I expect the natural answer is EDT (Washington DC time) but it's an extremely legitimate question in a country as big as the US and it should have been stated more clearly by the Dyslexic In Chief.

Mea culpa. Makes sense when someone can't distinguish between themselves, their business and a country, so it would never be UTC. That would be too convenient for other people.

Does anybody know for certain if friday midnight means friday 00:00 am or friday 11:59 pm? Basically, start of day friday or end of day?

Dutch media reports "night from Friday to Saturday", so it's the latter. But that still leaves the open question in which timezone the 11:59 is in (and whether that's a static timezone, or based on local time at departure/arrival), and whether the 11:59 refers to actual or planned time of departure/arrival.

Yes, multiple news media reports the ban going into effect on 11:59 pm Friday. Some (e.g., "The Sun") report it as 12:00 am Friday. Unless they give an official answer from the White House, I would not consider either report from news as reliable. "Midnight Friday" can be interpreted both ways until they clarify.

Midnight never refers to 11.59pm, which is one minute before midnight. I can say that for certain.

Normally I would take "midnight on Friday" as an instant to mean 2400, since if you're somewhere at 1am on Saturday morning you wouldn't consider it a problem to say "we were out partying on Friday night", but if you were there at 11pm on Friday night you would consider it a problem to say "we were out partying on Saturday night.

However in the particular case of something beginning, I would normally take take it to mean "the very start of Friday according to legal time".

Likewise, in the particular case of something ending, I would normally take it to mean "the very end of Friday according to legal time".

The people who went home just won the lottery ticket.

They did?

Depending on to which country they intended to travel exactly but all the western side of Europe is on the brink of COVID-19 explosion. Germany, France and Spain are just 7-10 days behind Italy based on number of corona virus infections. The rest are possibly around 2 weeks behind, I have not run the numbers for every country (disclosure: I am not a medical professional, my estimates are based on simple time series but at this stage of the infection these have been proven to be accurate enough).

Yay! I'm in Germany! The authorities here don't seem to care). I was trying to buy some food yesterday and there were massive queues hanging outside various apparently crowded social venues.

At least I work from home and my wife has been told they have to start wfh tomorrow.

Fellow German here. It's not that the authorities don't care. They're just putting "avoid panic" as their #1 priority above "contain the outbreak". Large events and gatherings are getting shut down, just not as vigorously as would be prudent.

You're assuming that the USA isn't.

Just because nobody's being tested in the US, doesn't mean nobody's infected; there are unquestionably tens of thousands of undiagnosed cases.

(This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552902)

Let me just explain this to my broker, see if they will unwind after my stops hit...

Stonks already hit the downside circuit breakers.

Not sure what you're looking at, but the S&P500 e-mini futures are still trading. No breakers were hit.

He is referring to the other day when trading was stop for 15 mins

No I don't think so. See this other poster's comment, 15 minutes after yours (synchronicity!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22553350

Yes, the E-mini S&P 500 Futures March contract (ESH0) did hit a Velocity Logic circuit breaker at 9:13:12 PM ET, soon after Trump announced the travel restrictions. The halt lasted for 10 seconds and then trading resumed. It's down 4.4% now and is getting close to the low price limit for the day, which could halt trading completely until the CME lowers the limit at 9:30 AM ET.

that’s right - don't ban the uk where many people have traveled from italy and the rest of the world unhindered. because the virus cares about politics and trump’s shenanigans. folks in the us - i really hope everyone poor and rich gets treatment when necessary, for free.

Does this mean return flights too?

Or just travel originating from Europe and going inbound to USA?

Couldnt you just travel to Canada and get to U.S through there? I get that it will reduce the number of people somewhat but it might

Is there a point to this? The virus is already everywhere.

Yes. The point is to flatten the curve. https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

That has nothing to do with the question.

Travel to and from doesn't lower the number of infections in the US, assuming prevalence is about equal on the two continents.

That was a direct response to the question. It's not the total number that matters, it's the rate.

Depends on how imaginative/paranoid you are. It sure seems odd that this week has included an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, a pandemic declaration, and now the biggest disruption of international travel/commerce since WW2. https://twitter.com/RusEmbUSA/status/1237048071223160833

If I would have my tin foiled hat on I would say something else is going.

We also found out this week that a man that is showing signs of dementia is all but certain to win the democratic primary and face Trump for the presidency. Weird times.

He’s dead Jim.

Captain, it appears the containment has failed. What are your next orders?

What if.. You travel to UK by land and take a plane to the USA?

How are you planning to travel to UK by land? It's an island!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

You can walk from France to the UK through the Chunnel, technically.

that's a 26km tunnel frequented by bullet trains, take some water and a helmet.

Yes, its dangerous and illegal but it's been done!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/22/sudanese-ref...

Chunnel notwithstanding, Northern Ireland is part of the UK.

Haven't seen any official details yet so just speculating at this point, but the China travel ban applies to "any foreign national who was in China during the last 14 days" (except green card holders/diplomats). It'll likely be a similar definition with the EU.

Edit: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting... confirmed this (countries in Schengen area)

This is possible. But less likely.

The point of travel restrictions is not to be 100% effective, but instead to reduce the number that travel.

The UK is in Europe.

Not any more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

Politically, it's not in the EU, but geographically/physically it's still in Europe.

Geographically Russia is in Europe

You're thinking of the European Union. Europe is a geographic area. The UK is still in it.

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