[HN Gopher] United States will place travel restrictions on S. A...
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United States will place travel restrictions on S. Africa and 7
other countries
Author : lukegen
Score : 24 points
Date : 2021-11-26 20:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It's already been detected in Hong Kong, Israel, and Belgium.
| We're not banning travel from any of them.
| Aliabid94 wrote:
| Ridiculous response - travel bans are not effective (the strain
| is definitely already here) and punish countries for
| transparency.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The US has been pretty transparent on that, that the goal is
| not to prevent it from coming here (that's impossible), but to
| slow its spread here to give scientists more time to evaluate
| its impact.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| And what evidence suggests that travel bans actually do
| anything to "slow the spread"?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Math? Any particular transmission event is chance of
| someone being infected X probability of transmission.
| Reduce the first term and the total number of infected
| individuals at a given time T is reduced (until any
| exponential growth swamps the terms).
|
| Point of saying "it's impossible to prevent" is that it's
| not possible to reduce the first term to 0.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Okay, even if it works (which is unlikely), what about
| the costs to society? Do the benefits outweigh those
| costs?
|
| There are other things in life to worry about than
| slowing the spread of exactly one illness... is it worth
| continuing to put those on the backburner?
|
| When does this end?
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| It might end when universal vaccination and other
| measures suppress COVID to occasional outbreaks that can
| be quickly put down.
|
| Otherwise it may never end. With widespread circulation,
| and selection pressure to evade immunity from vaccines
| and prior infection, escape variants may become the norm.
| Each new escape variant will require lockdowns, travel
| restrictions, and new vaccination.
|
| Pretending it is not happening is not an option either,
| when basic medical services are not available due to
| overwhelmed healthcare systems.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| It's been seen that vaccines do reduce the spread, but
| breakthrough infections are common. Even with 100%
| vaccination rate, we should expect new variants to
| continue to appear.
|
| The only way for covid to "end" is to accept that it's
| endemic and change our mentality towards living with it.
|
| Truthfully even if everybody on earth caught it
| simultaneously tomorrow, only a few percent would die,
| and society would not fundamentally change.
|
| It may sound heartless, but that's the truth. 1-2% of US
| population dies every year as a baseline as it is.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >until any exponential growth swamps the terms
|
| but isn't that almost immediately the case? Let's say you
| have only 50 people in the States who have the new
| variant before you notice it, with an r naught of 2-6
| that most of these strains seem to have after a few days
| you're probably already way beyond the few falsely
| negatively tested people who come in by plane. (the US
| still requires tests right?)
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| and if that impact is bad (i.e. vaccine escape, severe
| illness, and outcompetes Delta) then lockdowns are our only
| option.
| newbie2020 wrote:
| Racist and xenophobic president
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(page generated 2021-11-26 23:01 UTC)