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What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?
by sigil 6y ago
What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?
- ALittleLight 6y agoI feel we (US) should absolutely be closing the border to the UK, Japan, Italy and whoever else has the new strain/variant. Why would we wait on this when the evidence suggests the new version is more infectious?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoThere must be some very special political reason for keeping borders with UK open, so even Fauci seem to approve it. I wonder what is it?
- jtxx 6y agoI’ve been thinking about this as well, they also kept their borders open to US citizens despite most countries closing them. Perhaps Brexit closing trade doors with the EU could be resulting in a stronger relationship between the US & UK?
- vixen99 6y agoBritain has closed one trade door but opened a new one with the EU. Specifically they have reached a “zero tariff-zero quota deal”. Not ratified by the British Parliament but no one supposes this won't be done in the next few days before the final break with the EU on the 31st December.
- Izkata 6y agoYeah, from a bit over a year ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-brexit-trade-deal-john-bolton-first-in-line-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-brexit-t... Though AFAIK it's kinda up in the air if Biden would go for the same thing.
- bredren 6y agoAny new precedent for completely closing borders between developed nations for any reason is bad. Because it creates a “we did this before.” Even if the scale or details of circumstance are different—such as Clinton’s pardoning of his brother in minimizing Trump’s choices. Another reason is exceptions cause outrage. And there may be many instances of diplomatic or other government travel that needs to happen or happen in the slipstream of limited public travel.
- GregarianChild 6y agoCould you elaborate by which moral principle you come to the conclusion that a vague slippery slope and even more vague outrage is more important than stopping a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths? Most moral systems of my acquantance are based on a hierachy of values that puts saving human lives over just about anything.
- FpUser 6y ago>"Most moral systems of my acquantance are based on a hierachy of values that puts saving human lives over just about anything. " False. While not explicitly stated there is a threshold usually measurable in money spent after which saving life is considered of being "not worth it". Ford Pinto case that went through the courts I think can serve as a very good particular example where cost analysis made it legal to allow otherwise preventable deaths.
- Pyxl101 6y agoI don't necessarily subscribe to this point of view (I don't know what I believe; I need to think more), but allow me to play devil's advocate consider: most of the people who die from this disease are old people who have already lived their lives. The young are giving up the opportunity to live their lives by staying home to stop the spread, when they predominately aren't at risk of death. Should the young give up their lives to save the old? The young already sacrifice substantially for the old - in the United States by way of Medicare for example. The lives of many young people are completely on hold: they cannot go to school, cannot have weddings, cannot have fun, all to stop a disease that for most not-old healthy people is similar to the flu or even milder. If you're a young person you might not find this to be a worthwhile sacrifice - sacrificing years of your life to save people who have already lived "full" lives (that would be longer if not for COVID, but have made it to old age). The vast majority of deaths are people over age 55: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#AgeAndSex https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
- nostrademons 6y agoMakes it harder for doctors to get supplies if all the borders are closed. The UK has an upcoming COVID vaccine (the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford one) that may prove useful in the near future. Cut off the UK from the rest of the world and the rest of the world can't benefit from it. Also, it's almost certain that the UK strain is in the US already, and the US is shit at dealing with pandemics once they're on our soil. Border closures only work if your test/trace/isolate institutions and compliance with social distancing is good enough to eradicate the virus from within your borders; they prevent reinfection in that case. The US has shown we're completely incapable of that, so it really doesn't matter.
- khuey 6y agoNobody is talking about closing borders to cargo.
- nostrademons 6y agoActually they are: https://news.sky.com/story/emergency-talks-to-prevent-christmas-food-shortages-after-freight-hit-by-europes-border-closures-12169041 https://news.sky.com/story/emergency-talks-to-prevent-christ...
- maxerickson 6y agoDon't people and goods mostly travel separately?
- nostrademons 6y agoThey do, but many of the border closures apply to both.
- grey-area 6y agoThis variant is already widespread. It is very unlikely that it is not already spreading in the US.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoIt is very likely it is not spreading in US at all, otherwise it would have long been found. US also does fair amount of genomic surveillance, a new strain would not be unnoticed. Anyway, there must be proof that it is already spreading in US before, before keeping the borders open.
- matwood 6y agoWhat I’ve seen discussed is that closing borders only works if it’s done totally and immediately. Otherwise, it just slows response and causes super spreader events like we saw early this year in the US.
- bestnameever 6y agoHow does closing a border cause super spreader events?
- matwood 6y agoThe haphazard closure in March caused multi-hour long, crowded backups at airports as people tried to get back. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/trumps-coronavirus-travel-ban-causes-chaos-at-the-airports.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/trumps-coronavirus-t...
- dehrmann 6y agoThe UK also teed-up a super spreader event with its rushed lockdown last week. India did the same thing back in ~April, and it ended up encouraging traveling and dispersed people across the country.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoThe average case fatality is a person who is 80 years old with 2 co-morbidities. The under 55 years old age group (80% of the population) has on average more deaths by car accident than Covid deaths.
- Aeolun 6y agoIf the new strain is showing up in the UK now, and you haven’t had the borders closed for the past 2-4 weeks, there is little point to starting now (in terms of stopping it from getting to the US entirely anyway).
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoAnd the new strain was first recorded on September 16th. It's laughable to think it hasn't spread further (although hopefully I'm wrong on this).
- soared 6y agoFWIW, the US is now requiring negative covid tests from UK travelers - announced <24 hours after this comment was posted.
- jsnell 6y agoConcentrating contact tracing resources on cases of the new variant, where they'll do more good than applied randomly on all Covid cases. Targeted local shutdowns in locales where the new variant appears to have gotten a foothold. Enhanced screening of people with recent ties to the high risk areas. All the stuff we did, or should have done, for Covid itself when that pandemic was in its early stages, but with focus on the new variant. And sure, border closures too. They're late in that the new variant is probably present at some level in most of Europe. But the fewer cases you have to start with, the longer it'll stay contained at low levels. You might even be able to contain it entirely for a while. All the cases of B.1.1.7 in Denmark (0.4% of their sequencing) appear to be part of the same cluster. They should be able to manage that much better than if the variant was being constantly reintroduced by travelers. For the UK specifically, they're doing a bunch of things differently for their Tier 4 level vs. Tier 3, which was introduced specifically in response to B.1.1.7. Are you suggesting that all of those measures should have been done everywhere anyway?
- GregarianChild 6y agoCopy Taiwan. No country has been dealing better with Covid than Taiwan. No lockdown, and > 200 days without new Covid case [1]. Taipei had daily direct flights from Wuhan, and the Diamond Princess mooring near Taipei. They told the world early on [2] how they did it. Summary: Border closure, contract tracing, testing and controlled quarantine for those testing positive. It's worth reading [2] to realise how swiftly, decisively and rationally Taiwan reacted, and compare it with other countries. It probably helped having had an epidemiologist as vice-president [3]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/taiwan-domestic-covid-19-infection https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/taiwan-domesti... [2] C. Y. Wang, C. Y. Ng, R. H. Brook, Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Chien-jen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Chien-jen
- nickthemagicman 6y agoSo essentially big brother the country for a disease where the average case fatality is a person who is 80 years old with 2 co-morbidities. Where under 55 years old age group (80% of the population) had more deaths by car accident than Covid deaths. Doesn't sound rational to me.
- sharken 6y agoOr acceptable in the free world, fact is that the virus has only successfully been contained in big brother countries and island states. The rest of the world can not (and should not) try to replicate the same behaviour.
- GregarianChild 6y agoWhat do you find objectionable about Taiwan's Covid response, taking into account its success, not to mention the cost (in a general sense) of quarantining whole countries (which means restricting the freedom of millions of health citizens), and then not being successful, unlike Taiwan? In 2020, my mother (and millions of other citizens) spent more time at home quarantined than she would have spent in prison, had she committed a serious crime (other than extremely serious stuff like murder) as a first-time offender. Had the quarantine been as successful as Taiwan's policy ...