As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005). The US was intimately involved in the drafting of that document. The WHO was following the mandate it had been given.
> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization.
If you look at the WHO's history and read through the International Health Regulations, you'll find that the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy. Whatever measures it recommends are supposed to be in line with the IHR, and backed by the best available scientific evidence. The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks. This is one of the reasons why the IHR discourage travel restrictions.
> Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
It's not defeatist. It's rational. Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless. If there are already sick people inside your country, your first priority has to be finding them, isolating them, and quarantining their contacts. By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.
> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?
Neither hard enough nor early enough. By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal, there were probably already people with the virus inside the US. The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.
> Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019. The virus may have already been spreading around the world by then, but it had not yet been identified as a novel virus.
> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse.
What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening. If you start testing early enough in an outbreak and if you put enough resources into contact tracing, you can significantly slow - or even reverse - the spread of the virus. If you're not quick enough, you can at least figure out that you have to start implementing lockdowns. But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.
By the way, the blog you linked to is full of false claims. Right off the bat, it claims that in late January 2020,
> China, intentionally or otherwise, was able to lockdown its cities unknown to the world.
Probably every newspaper, news radio station and TV news show around the world covered the lockdown of Chinese cities in late January 2020. It was the #1 story worldwide.