2 ms·

That is a good point, the EU has a lower average but a truly fair policy would have a matrix of state-country combinations.

• rsynnott 5y ago
  It's less about fairness or even effectiveness, and more about the art of the possible, to be honest. Restricting travel from France to Germany or Florida to New York would probably be _far_ more effective in controlling covid (though, even then, not all that effective; once covid is present it mostly spreads internally in practice) than US<->EU restrictions, but it's obviously far less politically feasible. I feel like there's a large element of theatrics around covid travel restrictions (except for zero-covid-strategy countries, but those are rare); it's something that's relatively easy to do, so, even though it probably isn't particularly useful in most cases, it gets done. Ireland's mandatory hotel quarantine is a nice example; it currently largely applies to countries which people rarely travel to Ireland from anyway (Brazil being the main exception). It does _not_ apply, and never has applied to, say, the UK; despite the UK having very high rates right now, travel between the UK and Ireland is far too common for it to be feasible. But at the time it was introduced, the vaccine programme was slow due to supply issues, and the government wanted to be seen to be doing _something_, so...