London's Heathrow airport. BBC/EPA.
President Donald Trump has extended his travel ban to include the United Kingdom and Ireland. BBC. The ban will start on Monday at midnight eastern time. The ban comes a week after President Trump banned travel from the EU. US citizens will be allowed to come back to America but will be screened at airports. The UK and Ireland had been exempt but the President hinted that they might be added in the future. With the UK having 1140 cases and 21 deaths as of this writing, the President decided to include them.
My Comment:
At first I supported leaving the UK off the list as they didn't have that many cases but it's pretty clear that they are not handling this outbreak well. Unlike other European countries they are not issuing quarantines and social distancing under the idea that if introduced to early people will get frustrated and ignore orders. Instead the UK is promoting hand washing and "herd immunity" and admit that up to 60% of people there could get the disease.
I think that plan alone would be enough to ban travel from the UK. I think it's a terrible idea and it seems similar to what Iran is doing. They too said that quarantines don't work and now they are digging mass graves. China and South Korea on the other hand have greatly reduced new cases to the point where China is actually reducing some of their restrictions. Quite frankly, I think this plan is insanity and I sincerely hope that President Trump won't follow suit. To be fair to President Trump, his response seems totally different.
Ireland is a bit more of a mystery to me. Unlike the UK, I haven't been able to find too much about their response but they are closing schools and seem to be more proactive than the UK. They only have a few cases but I am thinking they are getting banned because of their close relationship with the UK and the fact that they share a border (kinda) with the UK. They only have 129 cases and 2 deaths as of this writing so this might be a bit of an overreaction to include them.
I do think that these travel bans will help. It seems clear that Europe is now the primary hot zone and if we had kept open borders with Europe we could have gotten a lot of new cases. Though it wouldn't have helped with our current cases of community transmissions it will prevent new cases coming from foreign countries. It doesn't matter if we have a special relationship with us, our first priority has to be the United States.
As far as the global response to Coronavirus, I think the United States is doing pretty well. We have had some major road bumps with the testing process but that seems to be getting better and we aren't doing totally stupid things like Iran and some of the countries in Europe are doing. It's too bad that we got a few cases of community transmission but what can you do at this point? At least there have been some actions to improve testing and take care of our people and small businesses financially.
As for me personally, I'm not too worried about myself but I am worried about my older family members. I'm in decent health and I have enough money in my bank account to last quite some time. Plus, unlike many people, my job isn't likely to be shut down even if we go full Wuhan style lockdown as it's a critical industry (though my own place in that industry might be more expendable than I think). Still, this story is going to be a huge one so I am guessing that I will be writing about the Coronavirus for quite some time in the future.
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