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Agree 100% -- that whole paragraph has some flimsy logic. The only bit of evidence they provide for travel bans not working is:

> For example, we had a travel ban with China in March 2020, only to be infiltrated with a European strain.

Isn't this a good sign that the travel ban actually worked -- i.e. created enough of a delay in the spread of covid to result in a meaningfully different pandemic than we would have otherwise experienced?

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For a variant with this level of transmissibility, doesn't it seem likely that it's already present in every nation with significant international travel?

The issue with the 2020 travel ban was indeed that it was for a single country only (later added Iran too), and AFAIK only included direct flights, which kinda defeats the point. You have to go all in or nothing.

Italy only banned direct flights from China which was indeed worse than useless, but the US travel ban was based on whether someone had been in China in I think the last 14 days and most subsequent travel restrictions have been modelled on that one.

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