Per capita it's really most of western Europe and the US that are struggling, and the US is doing better on vaccinations so far while it has had a higher case and death rate than most but not all of Europe. It's rather misleading to just cite a total confirmed case count.
There are only a handful of countries not western Europe or the US where I would trust their numbers. Of the list Vietnam is the only surprise.
Trust means their official numbers within a reasonable margin of error of correct. Nobody have perfectly accurate numbers, but the ones are trust are generally not miscounting by enough to worry about.
Tests weren't widely available a year ago. 3-6 months ago maybe.
In fact a year ago, exactly, the existence of COVID was still being denied or downplayed by the Chinese government. Very few people in the US even knew about it, and only if very plugged in to Chinese social media or non government sources.
I'm pretty sure it was being widely covered (and acknowledged by the chinese) in late January during Chinese New Year. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...
At the time the US evacuated ~200 people from Wuhan, flew them to LAX (well, landed at a nearby air force base), made them stay in isolation, then monitored them as they returned home for 2 weeks.
I think the times reported (in a serious article) that China reported the first death on or around that date (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wu...). I certainly recall seeing coverage of it before that although it was very muted.
"There is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, which would make it particularly dangerous, and it has not been tied to any deaths"
Clearly, between Jan 8 and late Jan, was the time of massive increased interest, so we're not really in disagreement.
The USA was doing 500k tests/day back in May, and over 1m tests/day by July. Probably couldn't have happened earlier than that, but it would definitely have been feasible mid last year.
In order for a policy like this to be workable, you need tests to be widely available in the countries people are travelling from because the whole point is to test people before departure - and they simply weren't in most non-US countries.
It was on my radar in mid January; I know this clearly because it made me choose not to buy plane tickets for a big family celebration scheduled for the end of February.
Well I'm talking about the 12th, China was rounding up and arresting doctors talking about it and making them sign apology statements. You might be thinking of a week or two later.
This is no surprise, although according to CDC research, this only reduces the infection rate among these passengers by 5-9%.
A lot of EU countries require their own citizens of their countries to get a COVID-19 PCR test prior to entry. A lot of times, this has to be paid out of pocket abroad.
What research is this? As far as I've been able to tell, CDC hasn't conducted a single randomized survey on any large group, but has only collected convenience samples.
Also keep in mind that due to compounding (keeping these people from infecting others on the plane and at home), the effect extends beyond the people prevented from traveling. You can also speculate that detectable infections are more transmissible during the journey.
I've heard that the vaccine doesn't make you less likely to transmit COVID - just less acute symptoms. So getting the vaccine doesn't really help other people - just you. From this perspective, this doesn't make much sense (unless the objective is to make $ for the corporations).
You heard wrong. Nobody actually knows if you can transmit after getting vaccinated or not. Thus far anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.
There is some evidence that some of the vaccines prevent transmissions, but we need more study before we can make a statistical determination.
We know why other vaccines have failed to stop transmission. The reasons those vaccines didn't stop transmission do not apply to the covid ones. However there is a lot we don't know about biology so until we have better evidence no expert will state that the vaccine stops transmission even though many believe it will.
It was just published today that in Israel, where around 20% of the population has already been vaccinated with the first dose, they're beginning to see clear evidence that vaccinated people do not transmit it others.
Anecdote from a German that visited Spain to see the family: Spains government requires <72h old negative covid test before entering the country, with 6000€ in fines if no test can be presented. Also, a form about symptoms etc had to be filled out.
After arriving at Valencia, Spain, there was a big line where we had to show the form's result QR code only. Not a single passenger was asked for the covid test.
Just so silly. More theater. We're already seeing millions of new cases per week including the strains with mutations to the target spike proteins - what problem does this solve?
In order to stop seeing "millions of new cases", every source of new cases should be reduced.
International travel is an orderly place to apply a filter, just as hospitals test all admits (even those without symptoms).
Blocking all visitors from specific places – even places with lower rates of prevalence than here! – was silly theater. This is actually well-targeted to reducing the interactions of the likely-infected with the uninfected.
(If a city or state/province even wanted to set up internal borders, & require on-the-spot quick antigen tests to enter regions of actual or attempted-infection control, perhaps even anonymously, that'd also be a well-targeted intervention far better than the other theater we've been fed so far.)
Even in expensive hospital systems in the SF Bay Area, it's not every patient getting a test, much to the chagrin of some of my friends working at the ones that aren't doing universal testing.
Well, it would've decreased the chances of a more infectious strain becoming widespread in the US if it had been implemented months ago. It could decrease the chances of worse strains that might originate outside the US becoming established moving forward.
Sure they can, but reducing the geographic spread would reduce the chances of those randomly occurring variants spreading quickly around the world. I would expect other countries to require testing of international flights for the same reasons.
The US is performing badly when it comes to controlling the virus, but it could still get significantly worse.
They should have done this when there were far fewer cases. It was really surprising to hear that you don’t need any tests or quarantining when you travel from other countries. Better late than never, I guess.
Well, got to remember, when there were far fewer cases, tests were still in prototype phase, not widely available, and in some cases unreliable (I think a lot of the Japanese cruise passengers that got the WHO test tested negative, then later came down with it after being released).
Didn't I just say testing wasn't reliable then, because it was very new? So it wasn't a long time ago. Reliable tests weren't available en masse until maybe summer, and even then not in all countries/areas.
India made tests mandatory to skip institutional quarantine on August 8th i.e. more than 5 months ago. That is sounds like a long time ago to me compared to when US has decided to make this a requirement.
Yeah, but we could have done more. There was a lot of supply chain issues the government just ignored. I remember in early 2020 when masks were unavailable a couple domestic mas manufacturers were saying they weren't comfortable producing more. They could scale up production, but they didn't want to deal with suddenly firing people when things went back to normal.
Just to clarify, the linked article isn't really talking about false positives. It's talking about people who are carrying the virus, but perhaps aren't contagious due to it being only small amounts.
This article doesn't mention PCR tests, so perhaps we're being smart enough to accept the often-more-relevant-for-infection-control antigen tests for this purpose. (I'd not yet bet on it, given how bureaucracies have made almost every wrong choice so far, but: maybe?)
But also: if PCR false-positives are a concern, the cycle standard can be reduced, or the reporting expanded to include the cycle on which a test turned positive, so that "positive" tests that are likely dubious/marginal/past-infection can distinguished from "blazing active infection".
The rapid antigen tests have a significant problem with false-negatives: the BMJ reported that Innova tests have 49% sensitivity.
That makes it pointless to use as a border control - for every two cases, at least one gets through. (Or, potentially much worse, under this system: I throw away my positive tests and show whatever false negative one I have).
You ideally want to be conservative and permit some false positives at an effective border control, because you don't want to risk infectious cases getting through and causing an untraceable national breakout.
Even tiny sensitivity would be better than nothing – or something that's so slow & expensive it's impractical.
But other antigen tests purport to have 90%+ sensitivity.
And the kinds of "PCR positives" they miss are often cases that are no longer infectious, anyway: lingering viral fragments, rather than live full-virus shedding.
So: ideal for border-control & creating other internal gradients that help suppress the worst active cases. The perfect should not be the enemy of the very good.
> Even tiny sensitivity would be better than nothing
Not if you imagine that one case on a plane = potential super-spreading event, the plane touches down and then newly infected people go in every direction.
Your hypothetical test with tiny sensitivity is pointless, in this regard: it has a (less than) tiny chance of preventing each risky passenger. In my view, any kind of low-sensitivity testing before departure is theatre: it won't make any difference in preventing new infection from breaking out.
The government of the country that I am in agrees, and requires a negative PCR test.
"False positive" isn't really an accurate term there.
If there's no virus, you're not going to be able to amplify it. A too-high threshold may detect non-contagious levels of virus (still a concern, if you're in the early pre-symptomatic days of an infection) or non-infectious virus particles left over post-infection.
Not really, no. They specifically pick genomic sequences believed to be unique to SARS-CoV-2; they're specific enough to distinguish between SARS-CoV-2 and the other known coronaviruses, let alone less related viruses.
All of the research on masks published before it became a political issue said as much. The general public doesn't wear masks properly enough for masks to have an infection control effect.
I recently had to get a negative COVID result to travel to Hawaii to see family. Hawaii only accepted tests from a very limited number of providers which complicated things, but after some effort I made an appointment and got a test. The rest of the process was very painless. We all had to keep masks on for the entire flight of course since there was no requirement that we all have a negative result before getting on the flight but it was comforting to know that nearly everyone else on the flight would have had a negative result so as to avoid the mandatory 14 day quarantine upon arrival.
If you enter Mauritius you have to get four tests in total over several weeks. Islands are taking advantage of their isolation to get this pandemic under control.
Madeira has been very successful during all of 2020 with not letting it escalate.
A similar requirement has been enacted in Canada and what has happened is that Canadians with covid can't return home to Canada and are stuck abroad.
It really gives some teeth to the "do not travel" recommendation - if you get covid abroad you can't come home until you test negative. If you get covid at home and then go abroad you can't come home until you test negative.
I think people who previously would have travelled and just risked it will be a lot more careful now since they can't get home if they are sick with covid. Instead of dozens of flights per day entering canada with covid cases we now have zero [1].
I don't think you need an 8 ball to predict that you shouldn't travel during this global pandemic -- especially in the past 6 months when it's all hit the fan.
Now they are in countries in the Caribbean that have managed the virus relatively well and are overloading their public health system because they urgently need tests. Canada is just creating a problem for poorer countries while gaining very little - there's barely any community spread. If a Canadian returns home from the Carribean, on average both countries will have less covid.
Governments has been telling people for months not to go on vacation, that is correct, they should have thought of that before leaving.
They also gave 2 weeks notice so if you went somewhere and didn't think you could get a COVID test, there was still time to make it back home before the ban started.
If only these people would suffer that would be alright - it was their mistake. But rich countries should not make poorer countries pay for the bad decisions of their own citizens. Policy needs to be guided by data, not emotions.
There are labs that guarantee < 72-hour turnaround times for travel. It costs extra but hey, that's life. This pandemic has been around for a year now so if it was that important to travel, it's worth paying extra for the test.
The 30 minute tests are antigen tests. The 72 hour tests are PCR tests. Antigen tests can basically only detect the virus if you're currently contagious. PCR tests can detect the virus before and after you're contagious. Airlines typically require the 72 hour PCR tests.
Not every place in the world is going to have PCR tests with results in a 72 hour window. There are going to be lots of Canadians falling through the cracks.
I am terrified of the possibility of this being retained after the pandemic and expanded to cover other maladies. There already is a concept called medical inadmissibility, but it only applies to foreign nationals. It really concerns me that we are not applying it to Canadians as well.
my friend's father passed away from covid three weeks after contracting it at a curling tournament which they obviously shouldn't have held, even in a small town in the middle of nowhere. he was 65 years old and had just retired. being dead is also not cool.
Only 2% of cases are coming from outside of the country, so this seems mostly like a political thing than actually being useful. There's a lot of lower hanging fruit to get a 2% reduction. This seems too heavy handed in places where it's not currently possible to do a 72 hour test.
At the very least give some options to those can't meet the requirement. These people have to quarantine two weeks after returning anyway - I just don't see the logic behind this move.
> These people have to quarantine two weeks after returning anyway - I just don't see the logic behind this move.
Well, presumably a lot of the people taking foreign holidays are covid sceptics. So expecting 100% compliance with all quarantine rules would be pretty naive.
>I'm totally ok with covid19 positive Canadians being stuck an unable to return home until they test negative.
I am not; your home country should never deny you entry. You're telling a citizen he is not welcome in his own country, is that how you want to treat your citizens?
Quarantine is warranted but denying entry has a weird taste to me
It's an imperfect solution. But thousands of people have left to the beach in Mexico, Florida, etc. We aren't talking of people that got surprised by COVID in March, we are talking of people that bought a plane ticket in the middle of the pandemic, traveled abroad for vacation, and are now inconvenienced by the fact they need to get tested to come back.
I'm also in the same situation with my home country. I was born there, has the country passport, don't mind 2 week quarantine, commercial airlines have expressed interest but they are simply not allowed. Only a pitiful amount of repatriation flights are done.
I can't believe it's harder to go back to my home country than to get a visa to the US. I'm lucky I can stay long-ish term in the US but many many others are screwed.
I understand the country is underequipped to deal with a lot of people coming back and it's better to protect many more people inside but I do feel forgotten sometimes. What's the point of having the citizenship then if I can't even come home?
I’m assuming this is Vietnam as I have friends going through the same issue. Citizens of Vietnam and they are on a 6-9 month waiting list for a repatriation flight with the gov’t basically saying “if you can stay where you are you can’t come here”.
They can’t even even pay for a commercial flights and quarantine like other countries.
And because Lunar New Year celebrations are coming up, repatriations flights have been cancelled until after as they are concerned with all the travel within the country.
I guess the situation with Vietnam is more unique that I thought.
This is an unrelated rant since the absurdity of the situation got to me. If you can hear the rumors about the reasons why there are fewer repatriation flights in January though, it definitely takes the cake.
There's a big problem of Vietnamese who are stranded and jobless in Japan -- they lost their (mostly travel-related) jobs, cannot pay tuition, and cannot return home:
Keep in mind individuals can test positive for months after being infected but are not at risk for spreading the virus. It really should be a negative test or 14+ days after a positive test.
totally ok with letting them get stuck abroad. It's weird that everyone is freaking out about people travelling when the airports remain open and the guidance is totally about what ppl do inside the country. If you must keep the airport open(IMO should close them), let people leave and don't let them come back. If they leave, it's their problem (and unfortunately, some other country's). Stay at home.
There are risks to traveling internationally, especially during a global pandemic. Getting stranded at your destination happens to be one of them.
I know a woman who traveled from the US to Trinidad last February to care for her mother. She is still stuck there today. Fortunately, she has internet and an understanding employer.
Small correction: you can't board a flight to Canada. You're always welcome at a land border without a test report in hand. In which case you'll be required to spend 14 days in government quarantine.
You spend the 14 days in quarantine either way - land or air. And it's not 'government quarantine' for most people - it's just a hotel room, airbnb or wherever your approved plan says you're going to quarantine.
"As has been the case for months, all travellers will have their quarantine plans reviewed by a government official and, if not suitable, will be required to quarantine in a federal quarantine facility."[1]
Canadian citizens and permanent residents always have a right to enter. Presumably if you come to a land border without a negative test, you won't be trusted to self-quarantine properly and will be whisked off into a federal facility.
I think it's highly dependent. I came to Canada a few months back, completed the Federal and Provincial quarantine plans. All I got at immigration was a "be careful" and 2 calls from the province asking if everything was ok.
I've heard that that is generally the case. I was merely pointing out that if you show up at a border crossing without a negative test despite it being required, you likely won't be trusted to "be careful".
I'm all for this, but I'm somewhat surprised that this isn't being railed as "xenophobic"... wonder why we've suddenly had a change in heart on these topics?
It Seems like a good idea but I worry about the slippery slope effect.
Can they require this for flu? How will they handle false positives? What about something like HIV? What if you need to get home for medical treatment or a family emergency?
HIV/AIDS is definitely frequently considered a pandemic, and at least a global epidemic. In any case the obvious difference is that it isn't as contagious.
The slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a logical fallacy because the argument can be applied to anything. You should at least offer an explanation of why believe the slippery slope is a risk in this case. What interest would the U.S. have in requiring Flu or HIV tests for travel? The reasons for requiring a covid test are obvious unless you're a person that believes covid is equivalent to the flu.
> The slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a logical fallacy because the argument can be applied to anything.
Can you expand on this? I've seen the claim several times, but given the fact that (in general, not referring to covid) it is possible to point to historical examples of how things progress from A->B->C, and then you can identify a sequence of A->B currently, it becomes almost silly not to conclude the goal is C. So why is demonstrating history repeating itself a fallacy?
Granted I've placed a number of conditions there. Maybe that's what you mean. I'm just curious what the general argument is.
> What interest would the U.S. have in requiring Flu or HIV tests for travel?
Humans unfortunately have a bias for "doing something" rather than nothing, even if the two actions are equivalent in consequence (which favors doing nothing - less energy).
Scream loud enough and we'll create problems where there weren't any. I mean that's basically what network news does all day every day. Then we'll respond to those problems, and create more problems. Etc. "It worked for covid, why aren't we doing it for the flu?" Even if the argument isn't valid, it sounds good, and politicians like things that sound good even if they don't do anything, creating problems and great expense for people for little to no actual gain.
That's an irony. USA is pretty much a fortress for as long as border security goes, and it had the best chance of any nation to avoid Covid impact by shutting itself off from the world using mechanisms of border security only.
Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
"We're testing all international travelers" is gonna be hard to tag that way. "We're banning people coming in from China but allowing in US citizens or permanent residents untested and unscreened on those same flights" looks pretty dumb from an epidemiological standpoint.
> “There’s no restriction on Americans going back and forth,” Klain said. “There are warnings. People should abide by those warnings. But today, 30 planes will land in Los Angeles that either originated in Beijing or came here on one-stops, 30 in San Francisco, 25 in New York City. Okay? So, unless we think that the color of the passport someone carries is a meaningful public health restriction, we have not placed a meaningful public health restriction.”
I don't really remember medical experts were saying in early 2020, but I would have supported banning specific countries if it was based on a framework that adjusted bans as the number of cases changed.
I remember being unimpressed with the timing, starting the ban right after the super bowl was over was a bad idea. And the US should have immediately started working towards testing all travelers.
When Trump banned China he put in all the press releases and announcement speeches that he also wanted to ban Mexico (0 known cases at the time). This easily led people to believe the whole thing was xenophobic.
Don't forget his earlier travel bans against primarily Muslim countries, excluding countries that he personally does business with. A history of xenophobic actions from Trump means that he reasonably lost the benefit of the doubt for later cases.
President Trump has never shied away from xenophobia from the day he announced his candidacy [1] to today when he gave a speech in Alamo, Texas [2] What Trump has done is try to minimize public concerns about COVID-19. [3]
Only if implemented in an inconsistent fashion - where travel from some areas with high levels of COVID is permitted, while travel from other areas with much lower levels of COVID is not.
Which is currently the case. For example, travel from Russia to the US is currently allowed, despite Russia having >3 million COVID cases, but travel from Finland (>37,000 COVID cases) and China (>97,000 COVID cases) is prohibited.
It's not even a quid-pro-quo, because Russia has banned travel from the United States (>22,700,000 COVID cases, FYI.)
If you want to stop travelers spreading COVID in the US, the first thing you should do is ban domestic travel, and the second thing you should do is to update the travel ban to include infection data from any point past ~April 2020.
If you're not willing to require someone flying from New York to Nashville to have a negative COVID test before getting on an airplane, you probably shouldn't spend too much time wringing your hands over someone flying from Hanoi to LA without one.
The first person would, most of the time, not bother making the drive, which would have the same mitigating effect on COVID transmission.
The real reason for why domestic flights don't require negative tests is because it's politically inconvenient for the government to ask for them, and because it would gut airline revenue. "Controlling the spread" plays second fiddle to matters of political expediency and money.
That, and it's much easier to impose restrictions on foreigners, even if, as of January 2021, those restrictions don't accomplish much.
> Which is currently the case. For example, travel from Russia to the US is currently allowed, despite Russia having >3 million COVID cases, but travel from Finland (>37,000 COVID cases) and China (>97,000 COVID cases) is prohibited.
China is doing great if those numbers can be trusted.
But Finland having 80x fewer cases when they have 25x fewer people isn't a big enough difference that I would say "much lower levels".
Finland's not exactly a COVID-free paradise, but my point is that there is no good epidemiological reason for a travel ban that includes it, but excludes Russia.
Which leads me to believe that the current travel bans have been made based on arbitrary political, rather than science-backed epidemiological reasoning.
You would need more than just a pre-travel testing requirement. You would also have needed an arrival quarantine and post-arrival testing.
I wonder what percent of asymptomatic positive cases pre-arrival testing actually catches. I’m sure that number also changes depending on how many days before traveling you’re allowed to get the test.
And to actually prevent COVID from entering the US, I think you would have needed all of that fully in place in January, or perhaps earlier.
Effectively what this would have meant is a total border closure for several months at the beginning of the year. I’m not sure if that would have literally been impossible, but I think it’s totally fathomable why that didn’t happen.
In January, outside of China (possibly elsewhere in Asia) absolutely everything was business as usual. I was traveling in Europe for 3 weeks at the end of January/beginning of February and everything was 100% normal.
The absolute earliest I could see significant shutting down in the US would have been early March which is when companies started canceling events, etc.
I don't have exact date timelines, but I know the large company I work for decided that the US was a coronavirus hotspot somewhere around the end of February and the beginning of March and banned business travel to or within the US. It was only in mid-March that they shut down the offices themselves, a couple of days before state or local governments began locking down.
I believe the current estimate is that there was uncontrolled community spread in the US by late February, and closing the borders to international travelers wouldn't have done anything to prevent its spread in the US.
I was at a relatively smallish (maybe a few hundred people) tech event in Phoenix the first week in March. There had been some consideration to canceling but they went ahead. They were cleaning surfaces, doing elbow bumps instead of handshakes but no masks, distancing, etc.
I was supposed to head on to another fairly small event in Tahoe the next week but the Thursday before, they canceled it. Which TBH seemed excessive to me at the time. (Though CA was starting to see an increase in cases.) I got home, did some shopping before everything went crazy but about a week later offices were closing, etc.
The Chinese were low key buying up as much medical supplies in Europe as they could get their hands on and flying them to China. This didn't raise any alarms.
The West displayed an enormous level of incompetence same as the Chinese authorities but you can at least understand why the CCP cadre in Wuhan was so negligent. There is something in the human brain that makes people incapable of recognizing danger until they experience it.
> You would need more than just a pre-travel testing requirement. You would also have needed an arrival quarantine and post-arrival testing.
Yes, and those are what US has in abundance, but does not use for some reason.
I believe every international airport has quarantine zones, and US has quite extensive TB quarantine infrastructure it could've reused.
Lastly, it could've finally put its incarceration industry to some good use.
It's very much like US found it had many months worth of PPE stockpiles laying forgotten in diffent institutions long after US spent hundreds of millions to rush order it from China.
Australia has had these measures in place for a while now but quite a while after January and they work pretty well. I think one of the very effective tools Australia has is the ability to close borders with other states. In the US even if one state is doing pretty well, it doesn't matter because people from other states will come in and ruin it.
But indeed this wasn't in place at the start of the pandemic, and New York's ability to enforce it is quite weak.
Do we know if the new US federal order will allow the unreliable rapid tests to meet the requirement? Canada's similar requirement, added last Thursday, insists on either a PCR test or an RT-LAMP test. Edit: the wording in the CDC's FAQ requires a "viral test (NAAT or antigen)". I guess that does include the unreliable rapid kind.
The US has two huge land borders that people regularly commute
and trade across (not to mention cross illegally).
The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
Even single breaches of their 100% quarantine of all arrivals caused outbreaks, and they also closed state borders.
This requirement begins to make sense now there is a vaccine, as within the US the curve should bend down vs the rest of the world, without the vaccine it wouldn't have achieved anything.
> The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
I don't know why it is ignored, but Vietnam (population 90M) is a large country with many land borders, including a border with China, and it has done spectacularly well containing the coronavirus.
Not to take anything away from the island countries but having no land borders makes limiting the influx of Covid much simpler.
I don't know much about Vietnam's borders and how much crossing there was in pre-Covid times but perhaps it should be the Covid success model that all non-island nations emulate.
you can close land borders just as you can close air borders. the threat model is average joe unknowningly carrying the coronavirus on their vacation / business commute, not some special op team sneaking into the country.
The land border with Canada has been closed (at the Canadian government's request) since March. Only trade is allowed, no personal travel at all. So, no, I don't think it's impractical at all. Trump did complain a lot about us closing it, though.
Air travel, however, has been permitted all along, and mostly from what I can tell because of the fact that the airline industry would go bankrupt otherwise. So there's still people coming into Canada from the US constantly by air, and likely breaking their 14 day quarantine period, too. I know of some
personally.
International travel is still being promoted heavily by airlines, despite governments giving official guidance to not go. Big scandals here in the last couple weeks about politicians taking off for tropical vacations, after instating tough lockdown rules and telling the public not to travel.
Canada also instituted the negative test on arrival rule in the last week or so. The caterwauling from our airlines was just ridiculous.
The federal governments in both Canada and the United States failed to make moves against travel early on, and they just let it coast for months, as if this virus was just going to go away on its own, because they were afraid of bankrupting the airlines.
> Canada also instituted the negative test on arrival rule in the last week or so. The caterwauling from our airlines was just ridiculous.
The negative test requirement is only for air travel, and in spite of your assertion, there is (limited) non-trade travel allowed across the border. I'm driving across the border in a few weeks, and for some reason don't need a test that I'd need if I flew.
> The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
Taiwan is another such success story (7 deaths total, zero domestic cases for over 200 days) and it's not exactly that isolated from, well, the place where the pandemic started.
It was. A sensible policy would have restricted all entries — at the time Trump restricted entry from China, there was no credible reason to believe that it hadn’t spread elsewhere.
> Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
Let's not forget that President Trump's order for closing the borders with even just the source nation of the contagion was labeled by the incoming President-elect as xenophobic[1]:
>> "We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency."
The relationship between border towns is very tight. You would ruin the entire southern economy if you banned cross-border travel entirely.
Back in the day before Mexico required passports to enter, many people lived in Tijuana and worked in San Diego. I'm sure this still happens today, and of course, you have to consider that many migrants work in US farms, etc.
San Ysidro is still the busiest border crossing in the world. It's nominally 'closed', but still open for trade. In normal times you don't need a full passport, either- just a passport card is fine, and realistically a CA driver's license will get you through without trouble. It kind of has to be that way- Tijuana and San Diego are far too closely tied together for much else.
Border closures don't have to be all or nothing. In Australia we closed borders between states but allowed work permits in some places and had fuzzy borders (people within 100km could cross) in others.
The UK is and island and they didn't do it either. It's learned helplessness: the world has given up on the idea that it's possible to contain the virus.
testing capacity couldn’t support it. no use doing this when the results come a week later. if this was a requirement earlier everyone would have complained it was just theater and not helping
I’m certain we could have figured out something earlier. We spend several billion dollars annually on an organization with a singular mandate to do so.
Maybe politicians should bite the bullet sometimes and do stuff that will not be immediately understood by every citizen.
Even without tests being widely available it would have been wise to require all arrivals to quarantine, as Taiwan has done with great success.
Yeah, sure, that would have been a nuisance for quite a few people and painful for the airline industry, true, but nowhere near as annoying and painful as things have ended up now.
In most countries they just want a negative test from the origin country, so the country being visited doesn't have to spend a test for the tourist. But it's not bulletproof, if someone tests false negative and flies and infects a few others.
Other countries (Taiwan, NZ?) quarantine you for 14 days on arrival, and also test you...
NZ currently requires a negative test if you are coming from the UK or US as well as 14 day quarantine for arrivals from anywhere (with more tests). You can also only return if you are a NZ citizen or permanent resident or you get some kind of special dispensation (notable recipients of these include film crews and America's Cup sailors).
India has had this requirement for a long time now (more than 6 months IIRC). If you don't have the negative test, you need to quarantine at preselected hotels near the airport after arrival. Most international airports now also offer on arrival tests.
There's really no point. Hundreds to thousands of people are contracting covid every day in every city across America. Over the course of five days in December, there were one million new cases. People coming in on international flights is basically irrelevant. That could start to change if the vaccine causes community spread to plummet.
Covid testing hasn't been, and still isn't, universally available. Mexico, to pick one neighboring country with a lot of cross-border traffic and cultural ties to the US, has done 97% fewer tests than the US has, for example.
I recall that the science deniers were the ones in favor of border restrictions. Besides, I don’t envy anybody whose position is so weak they must resort to finger pointing. A scientist would let the data speak.
It’s clear through this all that we’ve seen great power wielded. Regardless of who you support, I hope anybody reading this remembers that there are more important things than winning. The government has a monopoly on violence. It doesn’t need you that much. Our kids are the losers when we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other.
They based border restrictions on bigotry, not science. And the cost to wait and collect more of that data is time and corpses, so it's not so cut and dry.
> The only question is why this wasn't done as soon as travel was restarted
I'm not sure there was a point where travel was ever _stopped_? At least not for US citizens or residents. This is not to say the test requirement should not have been imposed (much) earlier, however!
This doesn't make any sense. Requiring a test on entry to country with full-fledged epidemia is like asking for an umbrella on entrance to the swimming pool.
This seems like a scheme that will be ripe for gaming / outright fraud. How exactly does the U.S. verify anything? Basically the only way to do this would be to have control over some kind of verification system that comes from vetted and registered hospitals.
Even then you have so many problems. There is no realistic way to even partially guarantee that forgeries won't happen regardless of your vetting system. And add to that the fact that the U.S. government has no control over regulations in foreign countries, so there is no way to force validators into compliance.
A half-baked plan that will screen out only some COVID carriers is better than the status quo where we screen out none of the COVID carriers.
In Hawaii, they have limited partnerships and Hawaii verifies the result directly with the labs. It says on the website they'll prosecute anybody that submits forgeries, but it's true that this is much easier to do when everything is within the same country.
It doesn't need any of that to be nearly entirely effective. The vast majority of people traveling into the country are not going to attempt to falsify documents.
I mean the number of people who are willing to commit forgery and lie to border patrol is probably pretty small. This is a huge step in the right direction that will prevent loads of air transmission. We don't really have time to wait years for a "fully baked" solution, and this is a solid compromise.
When I got the PCR COVID test administered when I had a suspected case, I was required to fill out a form stating my name, DOB, email, phone, physical address, full social security number, and student ID (I'm a college student). Since these are all attributes bound to identity, I'm sure it's not too difficult to make a database of test results.
...Just from the thought of it, forcing other countries to store your private info would be a terrible idea considering they probably could care less about it being stolen.
But, you are entirely missing the point. The U.S. cannot mandate that other countries maintain a database with U.S. citizens personal info, even if your idea didn't have massive gaping holes in it regarding security. It is simply impossible.
Forgeries of the international yellow fever vaccine certificate happen regularly. (For example, backpackers to Africa from Eastern European countries where the yellow fever vaccine was perennially unavailable at our local clinics printed out their own copy on yellow paper and put a fake stamp on it.) Nevertheless, the yellow-fever certificate requirement is believed to work well enough regardless. With COVID, too, one could argue that something is better than nothing.
My experience flying from the US to France through Portugal was that an agent at the gate looks over whatever paper you give them and highlights "PCR", "NEGATIVE" and the date and then hands it back.
Then in Portugal they asked for the paper and waved me through, and the same at the French border.
So logistically, pretty easy to fake (unless you're stupid enough to be trying to buy the fakes in the airport like some guys who got caught in Paris a few months ago) but I agree with other commenters it's better than nothing and will almost surely improve the rates of testing/precaution around travel.
Most of the countries that have sane case rates and many that are doing terribly with respect to case rate already require this. Some such as the Netherlands added it relatively recently for transit passengers as well, although most only require it for arrival passengers.
This will now place a strain on the testing facilities of small countries (islands) that are a popular destination of American tourists.
In Jamaica, every lab that has been approved to conduct the PCR test has been overwhelmed by a flood a Canadian tourists who now need a negative PCR test result to return home. Mind you, smaller countries have been having an uphill battle with procuring the reagents needed for the PCR tests because countries like the US is grabbing up everything COVID related, and not using them.
Had the US implemented these measures 9 months ago, the entire world would have looking at the tail-end of this pandemic, instead of waiting for the US to catchup with what every other country considers as a best practice.
Every other country? Have you looked at the recent COVID-19 case and death rates in much of western Europe? Many of those countries, one of which I live in (which still doesn't require testing arrival passengers), are still changing their policies on incoming travelers with respect to quarantining and testing. There isn't some global consensus that the US is blind to.
Are these PCR based tests? What is the accuracy rate? I was told it is far from 100%.
So is it possible that someone might test negative but then is actually asymptomatic?
This is exactly what happened last year in South Korea. People were tested many times and they were negative but turned out they were asymptomatic that the test kit failed to pick up.
Nothing about the virus is going to be 100% effective. It's a matter of compositing things that are 60% effective and 90% effective and 50% effective.
If they require testing which is 80% effective, and masks which are 80% effective, and get vaccination up to xx%... etc etc. You eliminate vectors for the virus one at a time and eventually there aren't enough vulnerable people contacting each other in ways that are contagious.
It isn't even 80% effective from the scientific journals I've read last year, the best they can do is 40% and lower, I think there is some inherent limitation in its accuracy.
I'd like to point out that many countries aren't running multiple tests to make up for this low accuracy like South Korea. It is the general consensus among experts that the actual case numbers are far far higher than what is reported
So if the 40% rate is true then the law of large number suggests the screening test is completely useless because it misses the 60% of the time. It's just like the Casino where the virus has a huge edge over our detection and prevention measures.
Every time you block some percentage of spreaders, you are reducing the reach of the virus. Even if a measure is only 20% effective, it's worth investing in.
If it's 40% effective and masks are 40% effective, collectively they are 64% effective together. This idea that measures need to be 90% effective is bunk. Incrementally we can improve the odds significantly.
In most other situations I would agree with you but this virus has a transmission R0 of 6!!! [1] This means even if you block 40% that remaining 60% that slipped by will overwhelm your medical infrastructure like what's happening in Japan now who didn't follow South Korea's standards (out of pride? so many countries chose to ignore Taiwan and South Korea's advices in the early days).
This is why you have extreme disparity between countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam vs America, Europe, Japan.
40% doesn't mean you are catching 40% of the viruses here. It means your detection is only at 40% capacity, like your vision.
I'm arguing for multiple PCR tests spread out over a few weeks to make up for this low accuracy. I doubt many people will put up with it like they did in South Korea or Taiwan. Especially North America where the individual rights come before the well being of society.
I actually thought that North American and Europe were anti-fragile, this virus quickly proved otherwise. How do you force individuals to comply with rules that is designed for the greater good when they've been told all their life their individual needs come first and the rest of society has to accommodate them?
Even getting people to wear masks is still an issue. I'm utterly disillusioned after 2020, the racist attacks from both sides of the political spectrum, the misinformation built upon centuries of stereotypes and exceptionalism, and a politically divided environment to boot.
As soon as we get more data on the vaccine's effectiveness on dealing with mutation variants over 1 or 2 years, I am getting the fuck out of North America and taking all the jobs with me.
Because this isn't the first pandemic and it sure as hell won't be the last, and I highly doubt people will have learned their lesson. Conspiracy, memes, and other incompetent thinking that arises from laziness. People in North America and Europe have lived comfortably for a long time post-WW2, relying on economic hegemonies, military intervention, immigration to do the dirty work, and I believe they are in decline now. Sure America will remain #1 military superpower but front lines have simply shifted away from trenches to our minds where you can conquer and control how people think in foreign countries. This is what unrestricted warfare looks like and we are seeing the fruit of this labor to the delight of its enemies.
[1] I recall reading Dr. Feigl-Ding's twitter last year which pointed to an American journal that cited this figure back in 2020 but I can't find it right now.
Are you suggesting closing international flights entirely or tighter restrictions should be required?
I've just heard quite a few people suggesting that if some counter-measure isn't "good enough" we shouldn't bother with it. I thought that's where you were going with this.
I don't object to tighter measures or double tests at all.
Also, I understand what you meant by 40% effective.
> So is it possible that someone might test negative but then is actually asymptomatic?
No, with PCR, the opposite is true. It is most likely that someone who is "positive" but asymptomatic has such a miniscule amount of virus in their system that they're not infectious.
> the researchers presumed that 30% of individuals who contract the new coronavirus never develop symptoms but remain 75% as infectious as those who do develop symptoms.
They made up some numbers and played with the math. It's conjecture, not research.
The second definition from Wiktionary is most appropriate for this situation:
> (formal) A supposition based upon incomplete evidence; a hypothesis.
There is no evidence that asymptomatic people are 75% as infectious as symptomatic people. The 75% number was fabricated to allow them to build a model. Asymptomatic people could be 0% as infectious as symptomatic people. Or, by some unexpected turn of fate, they could be 200% as infectious as symptomatic people. The evidence doesn't exist.
Your link even mentions another scientist who believes that asymptomatic people are only 35% as infectious.
But they'll let people in who have long term residency permits, or to visit long term partners, sick family members, or e.g. if their young children live there.
For Switzerland I know there's even a clause that lets you in if you have to go there for business. Kanye West was spotted in the country last month, I guess he was allowed in because he's building a villa there.
All countries have various levels of business travel, for example obviously all courier services and shipping still happens and other exceptions are made all the time depending on the situation. Diplomats can still travel. Kanye West can probably come up with a legitimate reason to travel to Switzerland even if he spends half his time on the ski slopes.
I don't know, even then, the "herd resistance" (not immunity) applies to new arrivals and residents alike.
Best advantage I see is perhaps plane ventilation is bad, but that would purely benefit other passengers and air transportation workers, not the general public. I doubt such narrow beneficiaries is their goal.
It's not clear to me how this works. What if you've recently recovered from a confirmed case of COVID-19? People can still test positive up to 90 days after recovery, even though all guidances say they stop being contagious 10 days from the onset of symptoms (assuming symptoms have improved and no fever).
And what about people who have been vaccinated. Wouldn't proof of vaccination be sufficient and spare limited testing capacity?
A positive test result from > 10 days ago and a temperature check should be sufficient. Otherwise, we're just asking people to get tested over and over (and most guidances say don't get tested within a few months of a positive result).
The vaccine question is going to be interesting. On one hand, if I'm vaccinated then I should be able to fly right? But no vaccine is 100% effective so do I need to get tested anyway? Are we just gonna have to get used to supplying a DNA sample every time we buy plane tickets?
This is moronic. We have between 30M and 130M cases here. There is no mathematically possible way in hell that international passengers could bring COVID here in any noticeable way at this point.
Why would they do this? I'll tell you the one and only one reason: some people are making tons of money off it. I just flew back to Hawaii from California and had to pay $170 for a COVID test, even though I'm already immune.
I think it’s more about protecting the passengers who are in an enclosed space together for 6+ hours than preventing spread within the US. I find it a big reassurance.
Surprising it took so long. I wonder if you are going to get some sort of certificate that proves you have been vaccinated for COVID once they roll out to everyone.
By now people can purchase negative Covid PCR test results at many international airports, sometimes for as little as $0.50. Entrepreneurial spirit is hard to tame.
Most US states already require a negative test or quarantine, with some exceptions. The only issue is that almost no one is enforcing it (maybe some airports do, I'm not sure). It makes sense if it becomes like visa where airlines wouldn't let you board the plane without it (until things are under control). It can be an issue for emergency travel though. Thinking about it, this should be of interest of airlines to protect their staff.
Right. Santa Clara County, California, has a mandatory 10-day quarantine for anyone arriving from more than 150 miles from its borders. This notice is posted in the airport but aside from that there is no framework for enforcement. It is not even all that easy to figure out what territory is outside this zone and the county does not provide a map.
Yea, we really should stop saying things like the government “requires” or “orders” something, if at the end of the day it’s not being enforced. No US state [EDIT except maybe Hawaii?] seems to have any kind of actually enforced public health rules around COVID besides business closures, where enforcement is spotty at best.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 549 ms ] threadhttps://boogheta.github.io/coronavirus-countries/
Trust means their official numbers within a reasonable margin of error of correct. Nobody have perfectly accurate numbers, but the ones are trust are generally not miscounting by enough to worry about.
In fact a year ago, exactly, the existence of COVID was still being denied or downplayed by the Chinese government. Very few people in the US even knew about it, and only if very plugged in to Chinese social media or non government sources.
what I said:
>In fact a year ago, exactly
Key word is exactly, as in Jan 12, 2020.
But just a few days before, the Times is a lot more rosy, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...
"There is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, which would make it particularly dangerous, and it has not been tied to any deaths"
Clearly, between Jan 8 and late Jan, was the time of massive increased interest, so we're not really in disagreement.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-...
A lot of EU countries require their own citizens of their countries to get a COVID-19 PCR test prior to entry. A lot of times, this has to be paid out of pocket abroad.
Also keep in mind that due to compounding (keeping these people from infecting others on the plane and at home), the effect extends beyond the people prevented from traveling. You can also speculate that detectable infections are more transmissible during the journey.
There is some evidence that some of the vaccines prevent transmissions, but we need more study before we can make a statistical determination.
We know why other vaccines have failed to stop transmission. The reasons those vaccines didn't stop transmission do not apply to the covid ones. However there is a lot we don't know about biology so until we have better evidence no expert will state that the vaccine stops transmission even though many believe it will.
After arriving at Valencia, Spain, there was a big line where we had to show the form's result QR code only. Not a single passenger was asked for the covid test.
International travel is an orderly place to apply a filter, just as hospitals test all admits (even those without symptoms).
Blocking all visitors from specific places – even places with lower rates of prevalence than here! – was silly theater. This is actually well-targeted to reducing the interactions of the likely-infected with the uninfected.
(If a city or state/province even wanted to set up internal borders, & require on-the-spot quick antigen tests to enter regions of actual or attempted-infection control, perhaps even anonymously, that'd also be a well-targeted intervention far better than the other theater we've been fed so far.)
Some may, but that's a county/state decision.
Adding this rule but allowing people to run maskless because "muh rights" is not going to accomplish anything.
The US is performing badly when it comes to controlling the virus, but it could still get significantly worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
But also: if PCR false-positives are a concern, the cycle standard can be reduced, or the reporting expanded to include the cycle on which a test turned positive, so that "positive" tests that are likely dubious/marginal/past-infection can distinguished from "blazing active infection".
That makes it pointless to use as a border control - for every two cases, at least one gets through. (Or, potentially much worse, under this system: I throw away my positive tests and show whatever false negative one I have).
You ideally want to be conservative and permit some false positives at an effective border control, because you don't want to risk infectious cases getting through and causing an untraceable national breakout.
But other antigen tests purport to have 90%+ sensitivity.
And the kinds of "PCR positives" they miss are often cases that are no longer infectious, anyway: lingering viral fragments, rather than live full-virus shedding.
So: ideal for border-control & creating other internal gradients that help suppress the worst active cases. The perfect should not be the enemy of the very good.
Not if you imagine that one case on a plane = potential super-spreading event, the plane touches down and then newly infected people go in every direction.
Your hypothetical test with tiny sensitivity is pointless, in this regard: it has a (less than) tiny chance of preventing each risky passenger. In my view, any kind of low-sensitivity testing before departure is theatre: it won't make any difference in preventing new infection from breaking out.
The government of the country that I am in agrees, and requires a negative PCR test.
If there's no virus, you're not going to be able to amplify it. A too-high threshold may detect non-contagious levels of virus (still a concern, if you're in the early pre-symptomatic days of an infection) or non-infectious virus particles left over post-infection.
Madeira has been very successful during all of 2020 with not letting it escalate.
[1] http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19...
But people are getting stuck because they can't get results back in the 72 hour window. That's really not cool.
That's their problem. Should have thought of that before going on vacation, etc.
Given 98% of cases are internal spread, I just don't think it's warranted.
Tough luck to those who get stranded, I say.
They also gave 2 weeks notice so if you went somewhere and didn't think you could get a COVID test, there was still time to make it back home before the ban started.
That's mature.
72 hours is a system problem, not a fundamental timeframe for the test.
In Central America - could vary a lot by country.
You're telling me there are no private labs that'll do it quicker? We have plenty in the Bay Area. Sounds like a market failure.
Only 2% of cases are coming from outside of the country, so this seems mostly like a political thing than actually being useful. There's a lot of lower hanging fruit to get a 2% reduction. This seems too heavy handed in places where it's not currently possible to do a 72 hour test.
At the very least give some options to those can't meet the requirement. These people have to quarantine two weeks after returning anyway - I just don't see the logic behind this move.
Well, presumably a lot of the people taking foreign holidays are covid sceptics. So expecting 100% compliance with all quarantine rules would be pretty naive.
I mean 100%, no, but enough to move the needle on the number of infections? I doubt it.
I am not; your home country should never deny you entry. You're telling a citizen he is not welcome in his own country, is that how you want to treat your citizens?
Quarantine is warranted but denying entry has a weird taste to me
I can't believe it's harder to go back to my home country than to get a visa to the US. I'm lucky I can stay long-ish term in the US but many many others are screwed.
I understand the country is underequipped to deal with a lot of people coming back and it's better to protect many more people inside but I do feel forgotten sometimes. What's the point of having the citizenship then if I can't even come home?
They can’t even even pay for a commercial flights and quarantine like other countries.
And because Lunar New Year celebrations are coming up, repatriations flights have been cancelled until after as they are concerned with all the travel within the country.
This is an unrelated rant since the absurdity of the situation got to me. If you can hear the rumors about the reasons why there are fewer repatriation flights in January though, it definitely takes the cake.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210103/p2a/00m/0na/00...
Not all travel is non-essential though (to a varying degree based on your belief of what "essential" encompasses).
I know a woman who traveled from the US to Trinidad last February to care for her mother. She is still stuck there today. Fortunately, she has internet and an understanding employer.
Canadian citizens and permanent residents always have a right to enter. Presumably if you come to a land border without a negative test, you won't be trusted to self-quarantine properly and will be whisked off into a federal facility.
https://www.canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2020/12/pre-d...
Can they require this for flu? How will they handle false positives? What about something like HIV? What if you need to get home for medical treatment or a family emergency?
I think they should. But the flu isn't as virulent as COVID.
> What about something like HIV?
You can't get HIV by someone breathing on you. How many people do you usually share needles with on airplanes?
Can you expand on this? I've seen the claim several times, but given the fact that (in general, not referring to covid) it is possible to point to historical examples of how things progress from A->B->C, and then you can identify a sequence of A->B currently, it becomes almost silly not to conclude the goal is C. So why is demonstrating history repeating itself a fallacy?
Granted I've placed a number of conditions there. Maybe that's what you mean. I'm just curious what the general argument is.
> What interest would the U.S. have in requiring Flu or HIV tests for travel?
Humans unfortunately have a bias for "doing something" rather than nothing, even if the two actions are equivalent in consequence (which favors doing nothing - less energy).
Scream loud enough and we'll create problems where there weren't any. I mean that's basically what network news does all day every day. Then we'll respond to those problems, and create more problems. Etc. "It worked for covid, why aren't we doing it for the flu?" Even if the argument isn't valid, it sounds good, and politicians like things that sound good even if they don't do anything, creating problems and great expense for people for little to no actual gain.
This is at least 6-9 months too late.
Yet, for some completely unfathomable reason, it didn't.
"We're testing all international travelers" is gonna be hard to tag that way. "We're banning people coming in from China but allowing in US citizens or permanent residents untested and unscreened on those same flights" looks pretty dumb from an epidemiological standpoint.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
> “There’s no restriction on Americans going back and forth,” Klain said. “There are warnings. People should abide by those warnings. But today, 30 planes will land in Los Angeles that either originated in Beijing or came here on one-stops, 30 in San Francisco, 25 in New York City. Okay? So, unless we think that the color of the passport someone carries is a meaningful public health restriction, we have not placed a meaningful public health restriction.”
I remember being unimpressed with the timing, starting the ban right after the super bowl was over was a bad idea. And the US should have immediately started working towards testing all travelers.
This is seriously failed leadership in the US. I haven't heard from anyone on either side calling for such measures.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/th...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/12/alamo-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/40-times-trump...
Which is currently the case. For example, travel from Russia to the US is currently allowed, despite Russia having >3 million COVID cases, but travel from Finland (>37,000 COVID cases) and China (>97,000 COVID cases) is prohibited.
It's not even a quid-pro-quo, because Russia has banned travel from the United States (>22,700,000 COVID cases, FYI.)
If you want to stop travelers spreading COVID in the US, the first thing you should do is ban domestic travel, and the second thing you should do is to update the travel ban to include infection data from any point past ~April 2020.
If you're not willing to require someone flying from New York to Nashville to have a negative COVID test before getting on an airplane, you probably shouldn't spend too much time wringing your hands over someone flying from Hanoi to LA without one.
The real reason for why domestic flights don't require negative tests is because it's politically inconvenient for the government to ask for them, and because it would gut airline revenue. "Controlling the spread" plays second fiddle to matters of political expediency and money.
That, and it's much easier to impose restrictions on foreigners, even if, as of January 2021, those restrictions don't accomplish much.
China is doing great if those numbers can be trusted.
But Finland having 80x fewer cases when they have 25x fewer people isn't a big enough difference that I would say "much lower levels".
Which leads me to believe that the current travel bans have been made based on arbitrary political, rather than science-backed epidemiological reasoning.
I wonder what percent of asymptomatic positive cases pre-arrival testing actually catches. I’m sure that number also changes depending on how many days before traveling you’re allowed to get the test.
And to actually prevent COVID from entering the US, I think you would have needed all of that fully in place in January, or perhaps earlier.
Effectively what this would have meant is a total border closure for several months at the beginning of the year. I’m not sure if that would have literally been impossible, but I think it’s totally fathomable why that didn’t happen.
The absolute earliest I could see significant shutting down in the US would have been early March which is when companies started canceling events, etc.
I believe the current estimate is that there was uncontrolled community spread in the US by late February, and closing the borders to international travelers wouldn't have done anything to prevent its spread in the US.
I was supposed to head on to another fairly small event in Tahoe the next week but the Thursday before, they canceled it. Which TBH seemed excessive to me at the time. (Though CA was starting to see an increase in cases.) I got home, did some shopping before everything went crazy but about a week later offices were closing, etc.
The West displayed an enormous level of incompetence same as the Chinese authorities but you can at least understand why the CCP cadre in Wuhan was so negligent. There is something in the human brain that makes people incapable of recognizing danger until they experience it.
Yes, and those are what US has in abundance, but does not use for some reason.
I believe every international airport has quarantine zones, and US has quite extensive TB quarantine infrastructure it could've reused.
Lastly, it could've finally put its incarceration industry to some good use.
It's very much like US found it had many months worth of PPE stockpiles laying forgotten in diffent institutions long after US spent hundreds of millions to rush order it from China.
Some of this is now present in parts of the US, such as New York state: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/covid-19-travel-advisory
But indeed this wasn't in place at the start of the pandemic, and New York's ability to enforce it is quite weak.
Do we know if the new US federal order will allow the unreliable rapid tests to meet the requirement? Canada's similar requirement, added last Thursday, insists on either a PCR test or an RT-LAMP test. Edit: the wording in the CDC's FAQ requires a "viral test (NAAT or antigen)". I guess that does include the unreliable rapid kind.
The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
Even single breaches of their 100% quarantine of all arrivals caused outbreaks, and they also closed state borders.
This requirement begins to make sense now there is a vaccine, as within the US the curve should bend down vs the rest of the world, without the vaccine it wouldn't have achieved anything.
I don't know why it is ignored, but Vietnam (population 90M) is a large country with many land borders, including a border with China, and it has done spectacularly well containing the coronavirus.
Not to take anything away from the island countries but having no land borders makes limiting the influx of Covid much simpler.
I don't know much about Vietnam's borders and how much crossing there was in pre-Covid times but perhaps it should be the Covid success model that all non-island nations emulate.
Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam have all had good overall success.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/16/thailand-cambo...
Air travel, however, has been permitted all along, and mostly from what I can tell because of the fact that the airline industry would go bankrupt otherwise. So there's still people coming into Canada from the US constantly by air, and likely breaking their 14 day quarantine period, too. I know of some personally.
International travel is still being promoted heavily by airlines, despite governments giving official guidance to not go. Big scandals here in the last couple weeks about politicians taking off for tropical vacations, after instating tough lockdown rules and telling the public not to travel.
Canada also instituted the negative test on arrival rule in the last week or so. The caterwauling from our airlines was just ridiculous.
The federal governments in both Canada and the United States failed to make moves against travel early on, and they just let it coast for months, as if this virus was just going to go away on its own, because they were afraid of bankrupting the airlines.
The negative test requirement is only for air travel, and in spite of your assertion, there is (limited) non-trade travel allowed across the border. I'm driving across the border in a few weeks, and for some reason don't need a test that I'd need if I flew.
Taiwan is another such success story (7 deaths total, zero domestic cases for over 200 days) and it's not exactly that isolated from, well, the place where the pandemic started.
Then it was a matter of rapid COVID tests not being available. It probably should been a few months ago.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel...
Let's not forget that President Trump's order for closing the borders with even just the source nation of the contagion was labeled by the incoming President-elect as xenophobic[1]:
>> "We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency."
[1]: https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370
Back in the day before Mexico required passports to enter, many people lived in Tijuana and worked in San Diego. I'm sure this still happens today, and of course, you have to consider that many migrants work in US farms, etc.
No measures are 100%, but they don't need to be.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...
Trump floated the idea of cancelling flights, initially from China, cause that was the only hot spot, back in Winter only to be called a racist.
More like a maginot line than a fortress.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/coronavirus-us-travel-rest...
Even without tests being widely available it would have been wise to require all arrivals to quarantine, as Taiwan has done with great success.
Yeah, sure, that would have been a nuisance for quite a few people and painful for the airline industry, true, but nowhere near as annoying and painful as things have ended up now.
Good for our constituants? check
Good for whoever pays for my campaign? check
Oh, you say it will jeopardize my reelection? fuggetaboutit /s
Other countries (Taiwan, NZ?) quarantine you for 14 days on arrival, and also test you...
Half our country's leadership being science deniers is a start
Yet many schools in the US are still closed.
I'm not sure there was a point where travel was ever _stopped_? At least not for US citizens or residents. This is not to say the test requirement should not have been imposed (much) earlier, however!
Even then you have so many problems. There is no realistic way to even partially guarantee that forgeries won't happen regardless of your vetting system. And add to that the fact that the U.S. government has no control over regulations in foreign countries, so there is no way to force validators into compliance.
This sounds half baked to me.
In Hawaii, they have limited partnerships and Hawaii verifies the result directly with the labs. It says on the website they'll prosecute anybody that submits forgeries, but it's true that this is much easier to do when everything is within the same country.
But, you are entirely missing the point. The U.S. cannot mandate that other countries maintain a database with U.S. citizens personal info, even if your idea didn't have massive gaping holes in it regarding security. It is simply impossible.
So logistically, pretty easy to fake (unless you're stupid enough to be trying to buy the fakes in the airport like some guys who got caught in Paris a few months ago) but I agree with other commenters it's better than nothing and will almost surely improve the rates of testing/precaution around travel.
In Jamaica, every lab that has been approved to conduct the PCR test has been overwhelmed by a flood a Canadian tourists who now need a negative PCR test result to return home. Mind you, smaller countries have been having an uphill battle with procuring the reagents needed for the PCR tests because countries like the US is grabbing up everything COVID related, and not using them.
Had the US implemented these measures 9 months ago, the entire world would have looking at the tail-end of this pandemic, instead of waiting for the US to catchup with what every other country considers as a best practice.
> Had the US implemented these measures 9 months ago, the entire world would have looking at the tail-end of this pandemic
I don't see how that's true given the situation in western Europe as well as several other countries and obviously the US.
So is it possible that someone might test negative but then is actually asymptomatic?
This is exactly what happened last year in South Korea. People were tested many times and they were negative but turned out they were asymptomatic that the test kit failed to pick up.
If they require testing which is 80% effective, and masks which are 80% effective, and get vaccination up to xx%... etc etc. You eliminate vectors for the virus one at a time and eventually there aren't enough vulnerable people contacting each other in ways that are contagious.
(Percentages are guesses)
I'd like to point out that many countries aren't running multiple tests to make up for this low accuracy like South Korea. It is the general consensus among experts that the actual case numbers are far far higher than what is reported
So if the 40% rate is true then the law of large number suggests the screening test is completely useless because it misses the 60% of the time. It's just like the Casino where the virus has a huge edge over our detection and prevention measures.
Every time you block some percentage of spreaders, you are reducing the reach of the virus. Even if a measure is only 20% effective, it's worth investing in.
If it's 40% effective and masks are 40% effective, collectively they are 64% effective together. This idea that measures need to be 90% effective is bunk. Incrementally we can improve the odds significantly.
This is why you have extreme disparity between countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam vs America, Europe, Japan.
40% doesn't mean you are catching 40% of the viruses here. It means your detection is only at 40% capacity, like your vision.
I'm arguing for multiple PCR tests spread out over a few weeks to make up for this low accuracy. I doubt many people will put up with it like they did in South Korea or Taiwan. Especially North America where the individual rights come before the well being of society.
I actually thought that North American and Europe were anti-fragile, this virus quickly proved otherwise. How do you force individuals to comply with rules that is designed for the greater good when they've been told all their life their individual needs come first and the rest of society has to accommodate them?
Even getting people to wear masks is still an issue. I'm utterly disillusioned after 2020, the racist attacks from both sides of the political spectrum, the misinformation built upon centuries of stereotypes and exceptionalism, and a politically divided environment to boot.
As soon as we get more data on the vaccine's effectiveness on dealing with mutation variants over 1 or 2 years, I am getting the fuck out of North America and taking all the jobs with me.
Because this isn't the first pandemic and it sure as hell won't be the last, and I highly doubt people will have learned their lesson. Conspiracy, memes, and other incompetent thinking that arises from laziness. People in North America and Europe have lived comfortably for a long time post-WW2, relying on economic hegemonies, military intervention, immigration to do the dirty work, and I believe they are in decline now. Sure America will remain #1 military superpower but front lines have simply shifted away from trenches to our minds where you can conquer and control how people think in foreign countries. This is what unrestricted warfare looks like and we are seeing the fruit of this labor to the delight of its enemies.
[1] I recall reading Dr. Feigl-Ding's twitter last year which pointed to an American journal that cited this figure back in 2020 but I can't find it right now.
Are you suggesting closing international flights entirely or tighter restrictions should be required?
I've just heard quite a few people suggesting that if some counter-measure isn't "good enough" we shouldn't bother with it. I thought that's where you were going with this.
I don't object to tighter measures or double tests at all.
Also, I understand what you meant by 40% effective.
No, with PCR, the opposite is true. It is most likely that someone who is "positive" but asymptomatic has such a miniscule amount of virus in their system that they're not infectious.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2021/01/11/asymptoma...
60% doesn't seem miniscule
They made up some numbers and played with the math. It's conjecture, not research.
Do you know what conjecture means?
> (formal) A supposition based upon incomplete evidence; a hypothesis.
There is no evidence that asymptomatic people are 75% as infectious as symptomatic people. The 75% number was fabricated to allow them to build a model. Asymptomatic people could be 0% as infectious as symptomatic people. Or, by some unexpected turn of fate, they could be 200% as infectious as symptomatic people. The evidence doesn't exist.
Your link even mentions another scientist who believes that asymptomatic people are only 35% as infectious.
I'm always stunned when I see these questions because I am like "People are traveling internationally - test or no test????"
But they'll let people in who have long term residency permits, or to visit long term partners, sick family members, or e.g. if their young children live there.
For Switzerland I know there's even a clause that lets you in if you have to go there for business. Kanye West was spotted in the country last month, I guess he was allowed in because he's building a villa there.
Best advantage I see is perhaps plane ventilation is bad, but that would purely benefit other passengers and air transportation workers, not the general public. I doubt such narrow beneficiaries is their goal.
And what about people who have been vaccinated. Wouldn't proof of vaccination be sufficient and spare limited testing capacity?
Then you wait until your test comes clear
> People can still test positive up to 90 days after recovery
In very rare cases
Traveling to another country is not a right but a privilege, many of HN commenters always like to throw this line.
EDIT: People who recover can in fact fly: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/testing-...
What they should do is test people leaving the US for other countries - spare the rest of the world.
Why would they do this? I'll tell you the one and only one reason: some people are making tons of money off it. I just flew back to Hawaii from California and had to pay $170 for a COVID test, even though I'm already immune.