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> Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not wo
by gfodor 5y ago
> Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not work.
This one point compromised the article for me. The standard for “working”, like all measures, is to slow down the spread. We all know travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them. But all countries imposed travel bans and we ought to be concrete about the level of delay they create or not. Let’s not hold any measure to a different standard due to political signaling. If travel restrictions are good on a risk adjusted basis to buy time for the “weeks” of analysis needed that could help with further reducing risk, let’s talk about it not write it off as “not working” which is non-sensical. Masks “don’t work”, vaccines “don’t work”, nothing “works” if that is taken to mean a silver bullet.
- WheelsAtLarge 5y agoTravel bans slow down the spread only if they are done for all travelers. The piece meal approach done by many countries where only certain countries are banded do little to stop the spread. The virus spreads too quickly and eventually it will come in via the travelers that are allowed to come in. Testing and retesting is probably the only way to slow it down other than a complete band on travelers.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoI agree with about 95% of this, but, I don't think "travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them." I think they got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them previously, targeting countries with you-know-what religion, for a political reason. Had it been just "we're going to reduce air traffic into the country to slow the spread of the virus," I don't think that would have been terribly controversial.
- bradlys 5y agoYeah, people forget the muslim ban happened before COVID.
- rowathay 5y agoPeople also forget that it wasn’t a Muslim ban. The world’s largest Muslim country was not included in it.
- msie 5y agoWell, those excluded countries included places where Trump had business interests and longtime allies of the US (Saudi Arabia). https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-trump-immigration-ban-conflict-of-interest/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-trump-immigration-ba...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rajup 5y agoSo it wasn't a Muslim ban then?
- nsxwolf 5y agoPlease just say "Trump" and "Muslims" and don't do the Voldemort / Macbeth thing.
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoIt failed to apply to populous or notorious Muslim countries like Indonesia or Pakistan, only to those which Obama had previously put on a list. It got a bad name for political reasons, not for the facts of the executive order.
- ehsankia 5y agoIt's also worth noting that a lot of the narrative makes it sound like people called him racist for the ban, but it was mostly his use of "Kung-flu" and "china virus" that people had an issue with, not the ban itself.
- blindmute 5y agoThis is absolutely not true. Every public figure left of center in the country commented viciously about the racist, stupid travel ban.
- ehsankia 5y agoSource please. Find me a prominent politician that specifically called the China travel ban itself racist or xenophobic. If every politician did it, it must be easy to find a clip.
- blindmute 5y agoOh, I did not read the thread closely enough. The muslim country travel ban, yes, there are many examples. China, not that I know of.
- ehsankia 5y agoFor the other ban, the fact that he called it a "muslim ban" and the specific countries that were picked is what made it racist and ineffective. It's hard to claim it's for security when they didn't include UAE, KSA, Egypt or Lebanon where the 9/11 hijackers were from [0]. It also happened to exclude all muslim countries where Trump has business in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_attacks#Hijackers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_... So yes, it had no other purpose than being racist. Just like Trump didn't really care to use the time bought by the Chinese travel ban to actually develop tests or ramp up PPE. It always was a show rooted in xenophobia.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
- XorNot 5y agoThe China travel ban wasn't opposed, it was ineffective because it was both late, and then they wasted all the useful time you could've gotten by not stopping indirect travel or travel from Europe where it was already spreading at the time. By the time a European travel ban was created, it was basically pointless because spread within the US was at wildfire levels compared to any possible contribution from international travel (the question of the morality of forcing flight crews to expose themselves to a deadly novel virus is of course quite a different one). The story of the Trump pandemic response is taking weak action months too late.
- timr 5y agoYep, we ought to be evidence-based about everything we have done: travel bans, masks, respirators, distancing, plexiglass, closing businesses, forcing healthy kids to wear masks in schools, forcing everyone to get vaccinated, rubber gloves in the grocery store. All of it. So far, our track record isn't that great. The two RCTs for masks and Covid showed minimal (if not zero) effect [1], and you can barely say the results out loud lest you get silenced by the angry mob (as you can see from the color of this comment). I'm not hopeful. But please let me know when someone actually does an unbiased study of travel restrictions. I have yet to see one. The biggest tragedy of this pandemic is the number of people who are willing to substitute their (popular) opinions for evidence and call it "science". I guarantee that every response to this comment will be from someone asserting that "masks work", and linking to a paper that they haven't actually read, or worse: an editorial about papers they haven't read. Most people have literally no idea what the data is on any of this. [1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk-of-covid19-by https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
- actually_a_dog 5y agoThat's incorrect. Here is a review of 19 RCTs showing that masks work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/
- timr 5y agoThis review says that none of the community mask trials showed a significant effect. It says that 3/6 studies on respirators in medical settings had no significant effect. It said that 3/5 studies for masks as source control showed no significant effect. Here's a review of every mask study ever performed: https://www.cato.org/working-paper/evidence-community-cloth-face-masking-limit-spread-sars-cov-2-critical-review https://www.cato.org/working-paper/evidence-community-cloth-... Here's a summary written by the same author, in case you're too busy to read 30,000 words: https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk-of-covid19-by https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
- 5y ago
- kylehotchkiss 5y agoThese travel bans serve to slow down the spread, but at the expense of keeping thousands of families separated and harming diplomacy between countries. Even air cargo has taken a big hit. And aviation has barely opened up, now to be put on hold again. The long term consequences of slowing a virus from entering a country for make a week or two are not being considered.
- ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y agoRight now we don't know the severity or impact of this variant, and several signs point in a bad direction. Maybe in 2 weeks we won't be worried about this variant, but right now being being proactive may slow down or even stop the spread of this variant. If China had instituted a travel ban in the early weeks instead of covering it up we may have never had a global pandemic - contact tracing and quarantines may have been enough to contain it in the early days.
- sbierwagen 5y agoFrom the article: >A travel ban is not an evidence-based solution unless you stop all travel from every country. Okay, why not do that? China's done it. Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand require a week+ quarantine for international travelers. It obviously works: it stopped two Omicron carriers at the border in Hong Kong. Why not do that? If COVID-19 is such a serious threat that it requires shutting down all schools for more than a year, why not take the comparatively minor step of halting or drastically limiting international travel?
- tenuousemphasis 5y agoSchools were closed at the local and state levels. Closing the borders requires action at a federal level. That seems incredibly unlikely to happen.
- the8472 5y agoFrom the outside it looks like a lot of policies are reactive, they aim at where the target was days before, not where it is now or where we'll anticipate it might be by the time policies go into effect. We already know we're acting on imcomplete, time-delayed information, i.e. we will only learn a few days later when the variant arrives in another country. So we have to compensate for that either by shutting everything down or by introducing artificial delays. And that's assuming all countries are testing and reporting the spread early. Some countries might lack coverage and thus act as dark hubs.
- sanedigital 5y agoYour last paragraph is begging the question: closing schools wasn’t required and was likely a major mistake. Closing borders just heaps more ineffective but costly action into the pile.
- righttoolforjob 5y ago1) It's too late (for this variant). So you can't act reactively. 2) When would you ever open then (since you need a proactive approach)? 3) How would trade look? I can't think of a single way of halting a contagious virus between countries that wouldn't completely shut us down as a race. The cost to humanity would be beyond imagination. Perhaps on the order of 100x-1000x that of corona.
- flunhat 5y agoAgree 100% -- that whole paragraph has some flimsy logic. The only bit of evidence they provide for travel bans not working is: > For example, we had a travel ban with China in March 2020, only to be infiltrated with a European strain. Isn't this a good sign that the travel ban actually worked -- i.e. created enough of a delay in the spread of covid to result in a meaningfully different pandemic than we would have otherwise experienced?
- AlexCoventry 5y agoFor a variant with this level of transmissibility, doesn't it seem likely that it's already present in every nation with significant international travel?
- ehsankia 5y agoThe issue with the 2020 travel ban was indeed that it was for a single country only (later added Iran too), and AFAIK only included direct flights, which kinda defeats the point. You have to go all in or nothing.
- makomk 5y agoItaly only banned direct flights from China which was indeed worse than useless, but the US travel ban was based on whether someone had been in China in I think the last 14 days and most subsequent travel restrictions have been modelled on that one.
- ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y agoYeah, I think the article missed the point on this one - travel bans aren't a panacea, but they definitely slow the spread and can buy valuable time at the start of an outbreak. There's been too much binary thinking by the media and politicians - for example masks aren't 100% effective, but they do reduce the viral load by 30-50% which could be the difference between getting mildly sick and getting a fatal exposure. We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of better.
- titzer 5y ago> but they do reduce the viral load by 30-50% I think the effect is much larger than that, but yes, absolutely. This is an important point that is constantly lost in the public discourse. We realize there's a big difference in dosage with poisons and radiation, but it's the same with viral infections; viruses do take time to replicate, so having a low initial exposure can give the immune system to ramp up sooner, before the infection has become severe (and then the immune response will also be severe).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ahdh8f4hf4h8 5y agoTheoretically masks would be much more effective than this - I think the 30-50% number came from a study where they looked at actual non-professional usage of masks. Most people have bad mask hygiene, so there is substantial air leaking around the nose or chin. Many of the makeshift masks people used are insufficient to capture viruses, but they do greatly reduce the "blast radius" of your breathing and coughs.
- timr 5y agoAll current evidence is that masks have a minor effect, measured in tiny fractions of a percent. https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk... To date, I'm aware of no study that has quantified a difference in infection, hospitalization or death that is attributable to travel bans.
- LegitShady 5y ago>because you-know-who proposed them Have we really arrived at the point where we've become the parody of a society in a Harry Potter book?
- gfodor 5y agoYea, it’s clear that even saying the world “Trump” triggers people enough that you stand to get more signal in responses if you avoid writing it. Don’t shoot the messenger, I don’t have TDS.
- LegitShady 5y agoI think that says a lot about those people more than anything else.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoTBF, I think Lovecraft did it first and that's a much darker world.
- oliv__ 5y agoThe standard for something "working" is very much up for debate though, even if it is carefully avoided. "Slowing the spread" is not a good enough argument in my opinion. Everyone wants to slow the spread, the only question worth asking is: at what cost? At what point do you deem something effective and worthy of sacrificing your freedoms for? 1% efficacy "slows the spread". Is that worth it? Where do you draw the line? 20%? 50%? Life is risky, everything is a gamble, yet somehow with COVID, all nuance has disappeared, life is not worth living until we can be 100% sure that there is no risk at all.
- spookthesunset 5y agoThe cost is something absolutely nobody wants to discuss but it is vital to do so. Yeah “slowing the spread” is important in a vacuum where we live with no friction and spherical cows but here in the real worth that one goal competes with literally everything else. Asking society to myopically focus on nothing but “slowing the spread” of one very specific illness for years on end is, quite frankly, madness. There is vastly more to life than just living it to slow the spread of exactly one disease. At some point in the near future, perhaps right today, people need to acknowledge that Covid and all its variants past present and future will be around forever. They can either learn to return to full normal 2019 life or piss an entire generation of people away on a battle that cannot ever be won.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoWell said. Any of the measures we have only delay the inevitable. They may have worked at the start to eradicate it but they didn't. Now it's pretty much guaranteed we will all get covid, and probably multiple times. Any of the tools we have now will not prevent that, just delay it. I'm not recommending dropping them altogether but we'll need to find a balance. To go from crisis mode into discussing long-term strategy.
- gfodor 5y agoI don’t disagree that is why I used the term risk-adjusted
- tinus_hn 5y agoYou need to be clear about the cost of these measures and about the benefit of the delays they buy. > to buy time for the “weeks” of analysis needed that could help with further reducing risk, We’re not going to learn anything useful in the few weeks bought by stopping these flights. And remember, even though the general public insists on these bans, international law proscribes no country can prevent its own citizens from returning home, so no ban can be absolute.
- gfodor 5y agoI have no such obligation nor a strong opinion. The author of the article said they don’t work. The burden you state is on them, not me. The passage you quoted had an “if” in front of it on purpose.
- tinus_hn 5y ago> If travel restrictions are good on a risk adjusted basis to buy time for the “weeks” of analysis needed that could help with further reducing risk, let’s talk about it not write it off as “not working” which is non-sensical. The unstated alternative to writing it off as not working is just enforcing bans on the basis of “better safe than sorry”. To me it’s clear that experience with the other variants shows that it just isn’t safe, so there is no “better safe than sorry”. Let’s talk about not just writing off the alternative as well.
- coolso 5y ago- "Travel bans don't work": supports banning the unvaccinated from traveling to particular establishments, supported preventing anyone from traveling pretty much anywhere during the first lockdown stages last year - "Walls don't work": closes and locks door when entering own home, probably has walls in house too - "Ivermectin is horse paste": is actually not good for COVID, but is on the WHO list of essential medicines and has saved countless lives and has a side effect profile that's tamer than most of the antibiotics that most US doctors will prescribe as a precautionary measure for a multitude of things The more they BS-us, the less we listen. Is that what they really want?
- cthalupa 5y ago> "Travel bans don't work": supports banning the unvaccinated from traveling to particular establishments, supported preventing anyone from traveling pretty much anywhere during the first lockdown stages last year The reason travel bans don't work is because we apply them too late and too selectively, because otherwise trade shuts down and we have other issues. A travel ban targeting African countries is not effective when the variant is already spreading on two other continents. You also cannot ban people from returning to their home country, so there is no way to truly prevent variants landing on the soil of a country with a travel ban. Establishments requiring vaccines acknowledge that you cannot stop the spread of the virus but require you take some minimal steps to reduce the risk profile. They are not the same thing. >- "Walls don't work": closes and locks door when entering own home, probably has walls in house too Doors and windows will not stop a motivated person from entering your home. Neither does a wall. People crossing the border illegally are motivated people, and a wall would not stop them either. Doors and locks are there to increase the effort required to break in, which is often a crime of opportunity. Border crossings are not a thing of opportunity. They are not the same thing. > "Ivermectin is horse paste" While I'm sure some people do not understand that Ivermectin is more than just horse paste, this largely has come out of people literally buying it in horse paste form from Tractor Supply and taking it because they think it will help with CV19. If someone is dealing with a parasitic infection then we should not mock them for taking ivermectin, but that has not been the context for 99.999% of all ivermectin related discussion over the past year.
- adamrezich 5y agoapparently the US is now doing a travel ban for eight African nations yet somehow I'm not holding my breath for these to be considered problematic in any way