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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

My favourite cruise ship fiasco this week has been the newly imposed rule in New Zealand - they can’t dock, go away. So hours before the ban was imposed one docked and dumped all it’s passengers in the capital. https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120298962/...

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I got some stern comments that "laws should never apply retroactively" for saying this, but I still believe: all those border closings should apply immediately from the second they're announced, and all quarantine requirements for returning passengers should apply retroactively, from a day or two before they were announced.

Because the story is the same all over the world. A country announces it'll close the borders in 2 days. A day after the announcement, every citizen of that country that was in COVID-19 hotspot returns to their homeland. In some cases avoiding quarantine.

Kind of related problem... A major city becomes an outbreak hot spot. The city enacts strict quarantine recommendations but they are not enforced by law and domestic travel is still permitted. People then flee the hot spot city and rapidly spread disease to other areas. This was a mistake Italy made that the US is repeating in places like NY, San Francisco, etc.

The border closings need to give notice, it doesn't really matter if some people notice and respond early to take advantage of the "loophole" because ultimately it's about controlling the spread, not stopping 100% (which is unrealistic)

The issue with immediate border closings is they create a lot of confusion. What happens to planes in the air or taking off or who does the policy actually apply to (see the initial iterations of the muslim ban where even the border agencies didn't have a consistent view of their own policy. The policy has to get out to the people at the border actually enforcing it too so it's either distributed early (meaning it will probably leak early and cause a rush then) or they only learn about it when everyone else does causing issues.

You think that's bad?

A cruise with 200 people was denied port in Portugal, so the ship went to Spain, dropped all the passengers and they took busses to enter Portugal.

One of the many reasons why the border is being shut

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