So why in God's name is the US not banning travel from UK to stop new strain?

Not sure that will work, as the UK is mostly white people, so banning them is not a big deal. Banning Asians on the other hand? Well that's just EVIL!

 

The British strain B.1.1.7 by now has been reported in multiple locations in the USA and in multiple cases, including in most instances, people who didn't travel, showing that there is community transmission, already. It has also been reported in multiple countries, in growing numbers. Too late to engage in a travel ban against British travelers. Not only the strain is already here and likely everywhere, but also, travelers from all other countries would continue to bring more of it in. Short of banning all travel which won't ever happen, there will be no stopping of the new strains.

I'm not hugely concerned about the British variant. Studies by Pfizer have just concluded that their vaccine acts against it. I'm more concerned about the South African strain. A confirmed case of reinfection with the South African variant was found in Brazil this week, showing that this strain may have drifted farther away and immunity against the previous dominant strain of the SARS-CoV-2 which was what is being used for the vaccines, may not fully protect against the South African strain. The woman in Brazil who caught it after having had the old-fashioned Covid-19, had WORSE symptoms than the first time around, suggesting that not even partial protection is happening.

This is not proof yet that the vaccines won't work against the South African strain. Studies on that are ongoing, by South African scientists, and should be announced anytime now. Maybe they even have been announced and I'm not up to date; I got distracted with the political events in the USA.

A case of reinfection might only signal that this woman has a week immune system. Maybe the vaccines and natural immunity still work against the South African strain. They should; the mutations although concerning are not yet massive. But yes, this virus is definitely drifting more strongly now than a few months ago, and it is concerning.

Yes, particularly the mRNA vaccines can be tweaked in a matter of 6 weeks to accommodate any new strain. That's one of the beauties of the mRNA platform. So, the problem is not scientific. But the problem remains important because having the ability to tweak the vaccine is not the same as producing billions of doses, distributing them, and inoculating people all over again, and there are constraints regarding raw materials and ingredients. The roll out has been sufficiently slow to be concerning; if we had to redo everything because of a new and aggressive strain that did not respond to the current vaccines, oh my...

Also, a matter of concern is how these two strains are more infectious, therefore they represent a bigger risk of overwhelming the healthcare system.

 

I have a feeling that diseases like this are the new normal.

Globalism has a created a more interconnected place, but that also has downsides.

Apparently if a disease is infectious enough, and can easily go around before being recognized, if it pops up in one remote part of the world, in a very short time it will be everywhere.
Life may never be the same.

In the old days there wasn't this large scale movement of people back-and-forth that was continually taking place. The world was more divided into separate regional spheres, people did not travel as often, maybe mostly only the rich and affluent, and when people did move across continents it was often a one-way trip to permanently immigrate. Now you have, for example, people from India moving to Canada, and then they keep vacationing back and forth to India, once or twice a year, to visit their extended family who still lives in India.

 

You are correct.

 

I've never understood that argument. So if a thousand people come in and they are infected with the new strain and they spread out all over the country, this will not be worse?

 

It will be worse, but the futility of the travel ban, is because all possibility of containment depends on a small number of infected people you may be able to trace and quarantine. Once community transmission in large and widespread areas happens though, this possibility is largely gone. Just today the CDC reiterated that 50% of transmission happens from asymptomatic cases. You can't really detect them in time because they are not having symptoms therefore see no reason to get tested. Then, if you get a new and much more infectious strain, with say, a R0 (R naught or reproduction number) of 5, it means that 1 infected person passes it on to 5, who then pass it on to 25, who then pass it on to 125, and so on. It gets to exponential growth (which is what you see when you look at a graph of the new strain in England; I'll show you one further down). At this point all control has already been lost and it spreads like wildfire, so, if you were to implement a complex and costly ban to prevent more of it from coming in, what exactly would you gain? Ten days?

According to the CDC, the new B.1.1.7 strain is poised to become the US predominant strain everywhere, by early March. Maybe if we implemented the most painful, strict, costly, and complex international travel ban from multiple (or most; better, all) countries, we'd get overwhelmed by the new strain in mid-March (because it is already here and spreading, anyway) instead of early March. There isn't much appetite for that, politically or economically, and it doesn't make a lot of epidemiological sense.



See how fast the new strain progressed in England? In three and a half weeks. I mean, they weren't importing it from anywhere. They weren't bringing in the 1,000 cases of travelers you're mentioning, and it STILL progressed very fast. They had ONE patient zero. The strain mutated inside his body. One body. He had a compromised immune system and the strain had more time to mutate inside him. Then it exploded and reached exponential growth, the way you're seeing in that graph, to astounding numbers in little more than 3 weeks.

So, we've had last I checked several dozen confirmed cases already in several locations in the US, most of them by non-travelers (which means, they caught it from someone else over here, in the community, not from abroad), and most likely literally thousands more, because we are actually very bad at sequencing the genome of new strains. We do it more rarely than other countries, actually. So, given B.1.1.7's extreme infectiousness, by the time we've already detected several dozen cases, we're in for rapid progression anyway, in some 7 weeks rather than Britain's 3.5 weeks, because we're bigger and more populous. Like I said, too late. Once you have such a steep, quasi-vertical exponential progression like what you're seeing in England, it doesn't really pay to avoid 1,000 people flying in when we'll be having literally hundreds of thousands of cases already here.

See, today we had 250,000 new cases. If the new strain is expect to become *predominant* by early March like the CDC is saying, that means we'd have to have at least 126,000 new DAILY cases of it. Actually more because by early March we'll be having way more than 250,000 daily cases. See why your 1,000 travelers are a drop of water in an ocean? EVERY DAY we'd be adding, domestically, hundreds of thousands of new cases.

In an ideal world, since you're technically correct, a full-blown travel ban from ALL countries in the world would slightly decrease the progression of the new strain, for a few days. But the cost/benefit ratio is not great. What would be the economic impact of completely closing the borders by air, sea, and land? Because that's the only way you'd decrease it; any country left out of the ban would still send the new strain in. I'd rather put the money and resources into vaccine distribution and inoculation given that thankfully the new strain is still susceptible to our existing vaccines, and on educational campaigns on TV (something we've had rather ZERO of, so far).

 

At what point did it become "too late" do you think?

 

The European Union has blocked the flights almost immediately.

Since there are always a lot of Italians in UK, imagine that our government, for a while, has considered to send the Navy to collect the Italians in the Kingdom!

Obviously testing all of them before of departure ... and after the arrival.

They reached an agreement to allow flights from UK carrying Italians who were coming back home [with test]. Some of them have been found positive to SARS-Cov-2.

Probably about US, it was better to block air traffic with UK.

 

Not sure that it is any different now than when I was a kid in that regard. Anyway, I think there was a lot of overreaction to this particular virus that made it worse for society, not better. Civilization will be fine.

 

When community transmission is first diagnosed. By that point, it's too late. It is still containable while all cases are people who came in via travel and their immediate contacts that can be quarantined. Once you start seeing cases that haven't traveled and can't be traced back to a traveler, it means the virus is already circulating widely in the community, making a travel ban a moot point, as explained above. Again, it is not that completely closing down the borders wouldn't slightly decrease the progression, but it would do it just for a few days once a new and highly infectious strain is already widely circulating, so the price to pay for that is not worth the outcome.

This is similar to the touted Chinese Travel "Ban" that Trump kept pounding his own chest for, claiming it as evidence of swift and decisive action against Covid-19. Well, first of all, the ban was not a ban; it was a partial travel "restriction" with a page-long list of exceptions, and it wasn't accompanied by mandatory quarantine measures, so the "ban" was toothless and didn't stop community transmission at all; better proof, we are one of the biggest hot spots in the world for Covid-19 in a manner far disproportional to our population (4% of the world's population, 20% of the cases).

I'm not saying that a ban can't work. It can but it needs to be complete and coupled with mandatory quarantine and tracing. That's what Uruguay did. They completely shut down their borders, air, land and sea, no exception whatsoever including for diplomatic passports, and mandated 21 days of supervised quarantine to anybody who still got in for some reason (such as a medical evacuation of one of their citizens). Well, that actually did it. Uruguay for the longest time had minimum Covid-19. While it went up a bit, still today they have only 248 deaths by Covid-19, which is #117 in the world in deaths by million of population, signaling that they did better than 116 other countries. In this same parameter, we are #12 in the world (actually it would make more sense to call us #10, given that two countries above us are so tiny that a handful of cases bumps up their deaths by "million" of population stats, both countries, San Marino and Liechtenstein, having a population under 38,000 people), showing how much better Uruguay's travel ban was, as compared to ours (although of course there are other factors, too).

Uruguay has the bad luck of being sandwiched between Brazil and Argentina, both huge hot spots, so likely some transmission occurred by land border that can't be patrolled in its entirety 24/7. A luckier country that is an island, New Zealand, also completely shut down their sea and air borders, and vigorously quarantined and contact-traced anybody who still got in. Result: total deaths 25, deaths by million of the population, #186 in the world. So, a travel ban *can* work but it needs to be drastic, no exceptions, and associated with mandatory quarantine and tracing, to be able to work.

It is interesting that my view on this is NOT Monday Morning Quarterbacking... when this thing first surfaced in Wuhan, I looked into the virology data, showing a respiratory virus, likely to be airborne (which was confirmed months later), highly infectious with a high R naught number, with a likely long incubation period making it harder to contain due to asymptomatic carriers (also confirmed later), and it being a novel virus, that is, likely to encounter very low immunity to it among the population, and I remember saying to my wife: "if these virology characteristics hold, we need to shut down our borders immediately and quarantine and contact-trace anybody who still got in, NOW, or else we'll lose control; this is the kind of virus that spreads like wildfire."

It's not that I blame the administration *on this.* As much as I was saying that, I also added "but it will never happen; people won't realize the seriousness of it until it's too late, and there will be no political appetite to implement such draconian measures while the threat seems so distant; so I predict that the virus will still get in and will run wild."

So, I'd have liked to see a real ban and not merely restrictions with a page-long list of exceptions, but given the characteristics of our country (unlike Uruguay and New Zealand we are huge, populous, and a main travel destination for literally millions of visitors who come in daily for tourism or business), frankly, we wouldn't have been able to contain it. Not a virus like this one. Certain actions of the Trump administration made it worse, and I do blame them for it (as much as I blame some actions by Democrats too) but actually there is serological evidence now that this virus was already here even before it was very evident in China. There is evidence that it was in Italy since September 2019, three months before the Wuhan outbreak.

So, despite what I said above, no, there wouldn't be fool-proof containment. I place my blame on very different aspects of the response: the way the administration tried hard to minimize it and made of mask wearing a political banner, undermining it at all times. We ended up in a politicized situation in which half the country thinks of this as a little flu, mocks masks and refuses to wear them, believing that if they don't wear masks they are showing allegiance to Trump and sticking it to the "liberuls." A simple and helpful (to a degree; of course not 100%) public health device, became a political statement... THAT is the biggest damage the administration fostered. All the "hoax" "little flu" "it will disappear like magic" "On 11/4 it will be gone" coupled with encouragement for superspreader events, is how we botched this so badly (and of course, BLM protests and the such were also superspreader events; there was stupidity regarding Covid-19 on both sides of the political divide).

There were several blunders including by public health officials (including Fauci and the CDC) perpetuating the myth that "masks don't work." Even today you'll find posters here arrogantly saying that they don't work, quoting junk science (despite huge evidence that they do, from real science), and completely misunderstanding the physics; they say the virus is smaller than the pores in the mask so masks can't filter the virus out which is untrue; thanks to a phenomenon called Brownian Motion: particulates the size of the coronavirus actually are more easily filtered by certain masks than particulates three times bigger, paradoxically. Yep, masks do work (to a certain degree, and when they are the right kinds, and are worn properly), and if we hadn't made of them a political banner, we'd probably be better off by now. We'd still have thousands of cases but we wouldn't be so close to overwhelming the healthcare system as we are, now.

 

It's not too late to contain the pandemic.

I want to be clear about this: it's all about the rate of contagion [R0 or Rt].
How many persons is an infected subject going to infect? Less than 1? Good.
More than 1? You've got a problem ...

Now ... you cannot infect 1/2 person!!!! It happens that statistics sound ridiculous ... ["listen, I give you 1/2 virus!"].
The point is that 100 new infected persons infect less or more than other 100 persons. Ok?

How can you reduce R0 [or Rt]?
Reducing the occasions in which the virus can be transmitted. It's not difficult to understand.

If persons gather indoor the risk of contagion is high. Overall if they take the mask off [just to say, in a restaurant you cannot eat wearing a mask!]. So to keep close all the places where persons could gather not wearing a mask is a good strategy. High Schools and university included [do you trust teens about wearing a mask for hours and hours? I don't ...].

Then ... shops, clubs, gyms ... swimming pools ... all the places where people gather can generate risk of contagion.

But public transports are a real problem: like in Italy and other countries on buses, undergrounds [subways], ferryboats, trains ... the usage of the mask has to be obligatory.

Moreover, also offices and firms are places where person gather. IF there is the possibility to work from home, smart working should be the choice. Otherwise ... masks, gloves, distances, sanitizing gel ... should be the rule where you work.

Doing this you can slow down the pandemic [don't dream: you won't stop it].

 

I'm still not seeing where you're coming from. Lets say that 100 people come into the country infected and contagious, and it spread to other people. This doesn't mean that it will spread to every single corner of the country does it? It's not anywhere near as likely to get to the rural parts of the country as it would be if 100,000 people come into the country infected and contagious, and it spreads to other people. The more people, the higher probability that one or more person will travel to less populated areas of the country, such as rural areas.

What's interesting, is that the Democrats didn't seem to use the list of exceptions as an attack on Trump. Am I correct?

As far as I'm concerned, every country has no choice but to permanently ban travel from China, or at least restricted travel if it's practical to enforce strict isolation for travelers, although you would almost need dedicated airport isolation facilities in order to do it well - one idea might be for a country to filter all travelers through a limited list of airports. I cannot for the life of me see how any country can in its right mind take the chance that this happens again with another new virus. The useless Chinese government doesn't seem to know the first thing about preventing viruses from breaking out and neither does the HOPELESSLY incompetent WHO. Nobody should have anything to do with that piece of crap country as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't go anywhere NEAR it, even if you paid me!

In terms of death per million?

My country, Australia, is even better - we are #162! I'm deeply offended that you cited our much smaller neighbour who is 23 places lower than us! Maybe you have family there, making it obviously more significant. I would accept that excuse.

You seem to be in the science industry - or perhaps retired.

Well, at the end of the day, governments are basically useless at everything aren't they.

You wouldn't have been able to contain it even with a "REAL ban?"

A Democratic President would have had the exact same CDC, right? Just a different Director.

That's just unbelievable!

While masks were underplayed by the right, do you think they over overplayed by the left?

It's worth noting that Biden had a rally later in March than Trump.

 

So Trump has placed an order to open up all air travel from Europe and Brazil next week. He is doing his best to keep the virus going
Trump lifted the travel bans, which have been in place since last spring, effective Jan. 26, a week after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

He is a dangerous traitor to the US