Hacker News Reader

> but no one shut down travel from Europe during March. Biggest mistake ever

The USA did shut their border to a lot of Europe in early March. But at the time the WHO opposed border closure.

Kind of - it closed the borders for Europeans traveling to the US, but did little to manage Americans returning from abroad. Given March is winter in the US (thus less tourism), I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure.

I think you are diminishing the amount of traffic between Europe and US on any given day. Closing the borders to Europe may very well have saved us from catastrophe. Numbers exploded everywhere in March.

>I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure.

Over 10 million a year from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and UK alone. Just tourist visas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_States#V...

>at the time

My point was that tourism to the US is probably not uniform throughout the year, and March is likely on the lower end of tourism. Hence the ratio of traffic being Americans returning home is higher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com