US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes Last night, Donald Trump made the second presidential address of his premiership to announce drastic steps to combat COVID-19 – including a ban on travel to the US from all 26 Schengen-area countries. Trump, who described COVID-19 as a "foreign virus", said the "EU failed to take the same precautions" as the US. The ban goes …
Trying something to make it look like they are doing something, rather than doing what they should have been doing weeks ago.
Many countries are testing more people in a day than the US has tested in a month. The numbers are so embarassing that the CDC took them off their web site. When pressed in an interview the surgeon general refused to give numbers.
This all looks like an incompetent government trying to pretend the problem isn't there. If you don't test then you don't have cases to report, problem solved.
No logic involved, just looking at actual numbers. And yes, the USA should be able to test more people more quickly than most if not all European countries, but is failing to do so. In testing it is behind the Netherlands, which is already pretty lax with testing, with only 17 million inhabitants.
This all looks like an incompetent government trying to pretend the problem isn't there. If you don't test then you don't have cases to report, problem solved.
And that is all that matters to His Royal Hinie. He said so himself last Friday at the CDC photo-op tour; he likes the "numbers" where they are. So, if you don't test, you don't find more cases, and the "numbers" stay artificially low.
"and in fairness at least they're trying something, even if it does appear flawed."
Try telling that to business...
He had a choice several weeks ago BEFORE the virus entered the States... He could have followed the Chinese lock-down and immediately closed the borders. He would only have had business to deal with.
Because HE didn't close the borders he now has the Population AND Business to care about. It's more than double the trouble now..
Thank you Mr Orange for all your clever ideas ( Only a week again he spouted out about how well they had handled the virus)
Ahh, ok, I see,a Trumpette.
"He had a choice several weeks ago BEFORE the virus entered the States"
He was in India, Adam Schiff had to chide him over Twitter to get him to do something, *anything*. Trump appointed the German Ambassador, who Tweeted "Has the Johns Hopkins map of the coronavirus stopped working for other people, or just me?" indicating he had no idea how to take charge of the agency that makes the numbers that John Hopkins map is based on.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/484501-a-member-of-trumps-coronavirus-task-force-asks
So then Trump appoints Alex Azar, HHS manager. Who sends HHS people to meet the Diamond Princess evacuees. People from HHS who have no protection, no equipment and no training, they meet Covid 19 patients, greet them and promptly go around the airbase all contaminated and go home on commercial flights and to their homes.
So then he demands emergency money from Congress, 2.5 billion and appoints Vice President Pence. Congress has no idea what the money is for. There is no plan. because he sacked the Pandemic response team that would normally track and plan these things. He has no idea what he's doing, So they pull out an old Obama H1N1 plan, add inflation and give him 8 billion. Republicans too, that's literally where that number came from, they all agreed he was an idiot and based the funding on the Obama plan.
So now he's variously gone from pretending it's nothing, pretending it's already contained, pretending its Obama's fault, pretending its Europe's fault.
And I see, from your history, that you've tried various contradictory defenses of his various contradictory positions.
PEOPLE WILL DIE. Those people will be mostly Republican demographic. Older weaker Republicans. I get that you're a sock puppet, but there will be actual deaths and they will be the people you think you're sock puppeting for.
Grow up.
So now he's variously gone from pretending it's nothing, pretending it's already contained, pretending its Obama's fault, pretending its Europe's fault.
And China. Don't forget China. It's the "China virus", or alternatively, the "Wuhan virus"( for those who may actually be able to read that furrin word).
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And as I like to back things up with sources where possible:
from CNBC "I'm also very much of a germophobe, by the way," he said. "Believe me."
the first thing he often tells his body man upon entering the Beast after shaking countless hands at campaign events: “Give me the stuff” — an immediate squirt of Purell.
Agreed it's surprising. I'm not joking but I just wonder what line Fox was running on this up until, say two weeks ago ? It might have lulled him into a false sense of security ?
I was pretty amazed that the US financial industry only seemed to sit up and take notice when cases began to appear in places they might have been on holiday to (eg Venice) rather than four weeks previously when hundreds of thousands of workers in the "worlds factory" were sitting at home by government order.
I find that if you're firm with viruses and speak to them in a firm, slow, clear and (most importantly) loud voice - in english of course (or as close as an American can get to that...) - then they do as they're told.
We can't let johnny-foreigner get all uppity, be he virus or no.
I also suggest we send a gunboat. Someone fetch Raquel Welch, a submarine and a miniaturising ray at once!
"The actions President Trump is taking to deny entry to foreign nationals who have been in affected areas will keep Americans safe and save American lives"
Because of course Americans can't be carriers, and we don't really care about foreigners' lives.
I expect we'll see testing numbers skyrocket here, as soon as Ivankacorp LLC gets the sole-source contract for the tests.
Nope. IvankaCorp LLC will obviously try to order testing kit from the cheapest supplier on Amazon, who happens to be based in China. Cheapest, because Profit!!11!Eleven So. delivery is stalled until Daddy opens the borders again and lets that nasty Corona beer come in again.
Whilst Larry Brilliant is an expert in this field and makes the case that testing is like turning on the light in the dark room, testing has it's limitations. Due to the slow incubation time infected people can have several negative tests before testing positive. Secondly, asymptomatic carriers tend not to get tested unless they infect someone who does get symptoms and the infection is traced back to them. Given that the virus can survive on a plastic or stainless steel surface for 2 days a great deal of contagion is untraceable. South Korea is attempting to tackle this by making public everywhere anyone with the virus has been: home, work, shops, relatives houses, bars, restaurants, love hotels (yes these are quite common in Korea). It must make for interesting consumption that makes all known GDPR breaches seem quite trivial.
Testing has its uses but it's not going to make this virus go away. Sufficient deaths to make people wary and keep a healthy distance from one another and get in the behavioural habit of not touching anything (especially their face) isn't going to eliminate it either, but it's certainly going to limit the speed of its spread.
Agreed and far more widespread than official numbers probably as well. The US has run a fraction of the tests any other country has, AND aren't even counting them centrally, which means that there are probably hundreds of un-diagnosed Americans wandering around.
Make that thousands if not tens of thousands. And for the thousands there is no probably, that is already a certainty.
As per the article, it is based on travel history - e.g. if you have been in Shengen in the last 14 days, no bueno.
So for them to transit Heathrow, they would have to arrive, stay in the UK for 14 days and then go on to USA. In other words, Trump is using us as a quarantine area for the rest of Europe...
In general, lying to Immigration officers is a bad plan. They have access to a lot more information than they admit to, and the costs of being found out lying is serious: as well as immediate penalties you are unlikely to be able to ever enter the country in the future.
And how would US immigration officials know whether a person arriving from Heathrow has just transited from an EU country? If the passenger bought separate tickets there would be know way to know - AFAIK the UK does not stamp passports of arriving EU visitors (or maybe it now does?).
Your passport is still scanned, that gets entered into a database of who entered the UK when and coming from where. Database which can be easily (if not already) shared with other border agencies to check if you can be granted entry.
I'm not even mentioning the fact that your whole travel booking history is probably already available to US snoops anyway, unless you are able to travel incognito.
The fact that the Americans have been travelling from EU to USA before now doesn't affect them at all. of course not, it's just the EU countries' own travellers that have brought the Covid19 to USA since numbers have been growing.
Questionable. I'd like to see the Covid19 strains that they analyse to see what the origins are. For example, in Italy the strain comes from the German one found mid January before this all broke out in Italy a few weeks later.
NextStrain has a lot of genetic data and the current set of data they have (as limited as it is) does strongly indicate community transmission in the states.
Just look at the red and grey chunk on the tree now ( https://nextstrain.org/ncov ) - that is a load of cases in Washington and on the Grand Princess, all nicely related.
Indeed, most of the US cases that have been submitted to GISAID (the underlying dataset) seem to come from China rather than Europe. OK, there are a couple that may have come via the UK (hard to say definitively with the limited data), but they have then spread in-country.
Maybe you felt "owned", but that says more about you are your victim mentality than it does about the EU.
And way to ignore Brangdon's actual point (well, you kind of had to, because you don't have an answer to it) that the travel ban was applied to the Schengen zone, not to the EU.
@desht
"Maybe you felt "owned", but that says more about you are your victim mentality than it does about the EU."
It wasnt me who used the wording. And the EU was over the country which is why the loss of sovereignty thing was an issue. Which is why the tampon tax (for example) can be lifted next year. Literally the piss poor excuse for not being able to control our own domestic tax affairs is because we belonged to the EU.
"And way to ignore Brangdon's actual point (well, you kind of had to, because you don't have an answer to it) that the travel ban was applied to the Schengen zone, not to the EU."
I didnt intend to ignore it. By no longer belonging to the EU we no longer have to fear being forced to join as they push 'more Europe' and 'ever closer Union'. Again opting out of part of the project brings gains.
@AndrueC
"Strange. To me it felt like family. Sometimes we argue. We like to live our own lives. But we love each other nonetheless."
Some people might have a sense of belonging but the wording didnt suggest that (nor is that my view). As individual countries I dont think we have too many problems but the EU as a separate entity isnt much of a friend.
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*cough*
And along those lines, has anyone noticed the suspicious similarity between the infamous Trump mislepting "covfefe" and "covid-19"? This covspiracy has been around a long-time! The covfering up operation has clearly been extensife.
Which is probably why now everyone who finds out about it is finished off in suspicovious circumstancevs...
... oops ...
Sorry guys...
.. anyway, see you on the ovther side.
It's quite obvious that in a country with no protections for workers, no free healthcare system, and no bloody kits to test anyone, you are likely to see a much bigger spread of the virus than anywhere else. So in fact, this is the best thing that could have happened to Europe. As soon as the virus takes hold fully in the US of A there is absolutely nothing to stop its inexorable spread.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
Stats and predictions. Essentially the sooner they lock down the (massively) fewer cases. If you allow your healthcare system to become overwhelmed then the death rate will be ~3%-5%. If not overwhelmed then the death rate will be ~0.5%-0.9%.
This might be the event that finally gets American politicians to accept that a universal healthcare system is actually a good idea and not Communism dressed as a medic.
It's about a 10 minute read, or 5 if you skip the repeated examples, or 0 if you assume that it was probably a waste of time because all evidence used in an internet argument is probably made up bollocks anyway.
Of course, you should totally read this article about how posting links in your comment makes your sexual organs 20% bigger.
I keep seeing these graphs showing how if we work together (well, apart) then we can shift the peak of the outbreak and keep it under the dotted line of the capability of our health care system to cope.
Every time I can't help thinking that the dotted line of 'healthcare system capacity' is much higher than it really is in the real world, and no amount of mitigation is going to let us limbo out way underneath it.
Not that we shouldn't try of course, but the NHS runs out of capacity when there's a bad cold going about, and this is going to be worse.
-- Thanks, AC. Took me a while to work through the maths, but -- keeping in mind that the figures are meant as very rough estimates -- most of the essay makes sense. At least to my muddled mind.
Funny, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The people I have to worry about are relatively few, and while both myself and my wife are in the danger zone age-wise, we're both lean and healthy with strong lungs, so our odds for recovery are good. If infected. So my concern is being socially responsible about limiting the spread.
Few people here in southern Oregon seem to be taking precautions. Two days ago no one at the supermarket was wearing gloves or wiping shopping cart handles, except me. Right now the officially known cases in Oregon stand at 15, but with no travel restrictions inside the USA, I expect that will change as the epidemic travels along Interstate 5 from northern Washington and central California.
This paragraph sums up all you need to know about our Dear Leader and his premiership1
Trump, who described COVID-19 as a "foreign virus", said the "EU failed to take the same precautions" as the US. The ban goes into effect tomorrow (Friday, March 13) and will last for 30 days. Both the UK and Ireland — which happen to be the only European nations with Trump golf courses — are exempt.
There you have it: xenophobia, blaming everybody else, self-dealing --- the whole enchilada. (OOPS!, that is a reference to something Mexican, which as we all know is not permitted in tRump's Cowardly New World.)
1The "premiership" term came from the paragraph preceding the one quoted above. El Reg was really on its game for this article.
To bring back Brexit, the UK would first have to be accepted as a member again by the EU, not going to happen. I give Scotland and Northern Ireland a fair chance (though Northern Ireland has a quicker route through reuniting with the Irish Republic), but not the UK as a whole and not England.
I wonder if Trump is aware, even if you are aware, that Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus and Romania are members of the EU but not signed up to the Schengen agreement. Are their citizens allowed to enter the US of A? That's a rhetorical question, of course: EU lawyers say "Yes", US border security say >THWACK!<
They have a government department dedicated to home preparation and preservation of foodstuffs. Tried and approved recipes and methodologies for every type of food you could think of. The "survivalist" mentality is well engrained over there.
Not that I'm complaining, because it's rather handy to know how to safely prepare fruits and meals that will keep for two years unrefrigerated. I've got a big shelf full of stuff already. Now all I need is a shotgun in case any of them pesky varmint virus particles come a tryin' to git into Fort TRT.
IGotOut,
I know that your comment is in jest *but* ....
I predict that in the next month or two some 'usian', out of fear & ignorance, will shoot someone to save themselves from the 'Foreign virus'.
Their victim will be a 'Foreign' intruder in their community with a less than 'lily white' complexion.
They will, of course, *not* be infected with coronavirus COVID-19.
The clock starts ticking now !!! .......
If the spray or wipe contains at least 60% alcohol, then it is effective against coronavirus.
A lipid membrane holds together the virus' proteins and DNA, and because that membrane is rather fragile -- no covalent chemical bonds -- alcohol breaks it up. So does soap, for that matter.
So wash yo' danged hands! And if you don't gots no soap and water, use alcohol-based wipes and sanitizers.
Curious how well Everclear, Bacardi 151, and other high-octane spirits are selling. "Also works as a hand sanitizer!"* might not be to everyone's taste but why waste a good crisis?
* I heard that someone tried to promote a brand of vodka for home-made hand sanitizer, but alas that brand (tasty, I hear) was only 40% and not effective for that use.
Damn it, gin is my high-octane flavor of choice. Hulk say, "GIN NOT STRONG ENOUGH!!" (Bruce Banner says, "Don't buy me a drink... you wouldn't like me when I'm drunk)."
I put together a spreadsheet with variable factors for rate of spread, death rate, calcs for current infections based on known deaths and as extrapolated from foreign vs community sources of infection, etc. USA only, I'm afraid.
This is strictly amateur stuff, based on current data and assuming that the US infection rate behaves as a block, with no regional quirks and discontinuities -- WHICH IS UNREALISTIC. So caveat lector, and I put it in italics so you'd notice.
For the US, the (caveat lector!) upshot seems to be 100,000 infections by the end of March, 1,000,000 by the third week in April. Total deaths hit 4000 by the last quarter of April as well.
There's bound to be a drop-off in infection rate as the number of immune individuals -- those who have been through the viral wringer and so acquired immunity -- becomes appreciable. I don't know where that epidemiological break-point is and I am too lazy to look it up. It may be around the 30% infection benchmark, as mentioned in the Tomas Pueys essay. I ramped down the infection rate starting at about 900,000 cases, but it's not enough. At the peak, May 18, I still end up infecting more than the entire population of the USA.
Maybe the spreadsheet is telling me the virus jumps to dogs after it infects 900,000 humans. Um. No, can't be right. Maybe it's user error... just maybe...
Note that a vaccine is probably 12 to 18 months away. At current rates of spread, the vaccine is the horse that slept through the race.
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