Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, March 13, 2020

The Ineffably Stable Genius of Travel Restrictions

I'll outsource to Matthew Yglesias. Here's an excerpt:

[A]s my colleague Jen Kirby has written, experts are deeply skeptical that travel restrictions are a particularly high-value measure at this point. And even if Trump’s enthusiasm for them is not wrong per se, it’s clear that his obsession with the concept of an external threat has had catastrophic consequences for the United States. Due to his strong orientation in favor of travel bans, Trump was early in restricting travel from China — a measure that he said would prevent the virus from entering the United States. It obviously failed at that goal, but Trump insists at every opportunity on claiming and receiving credit for having been ahead of the coronavirus curve.
The problem is that while these measures probably were successful at helping the United States buy time, Trump didn’t do anything with the time.
And on the whole range of issues currently confronting the country — from economic stimulus to aiding people who are sick to advising state and local governments on what precautions to take to bolstering public health capacity — the administration did nothing at all throughout January and February.
It’s understandable that the president hoped the travel restrictions would work. But he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t shut off all travel to the United States (which would have been economically ruinous) and thus that it was possible border control would fail. Experts were nearly unanimous in their judgment that travel restrictions would not work, and Trump not only overruled their advice to put restrictions in place, he ignored their warnings and did nothing to create any kind of fallback plan. And since he’s stubborn and vainglorious, he continues to insist that the moral of this whole story is that the experts were wrong and he was right so we should bank on further travel restrictions to save us. It’s absurd.
Here's what's actually happening right now. As Paul Campos summarizes:

A hospital worker who is at extreme risk for having contracted the coronavirus can’t get tested for it, and has to keep going to work every day, because Calvinism.
Note too that there is as of now no evidence that Trump’s catastrophic non-response to the pandemic has had any effect on his approval ratings or chances at re-election. Polling on how he’s handling the crisis exactly mirrors his overall approval ratings. We are going to have a rolling several-month public health disaster, along with a recession, and Trump could still well be re-elected, while losing the popular vote by many millions of ballots, because Wisdom of the Framers. And outsourced Russian troll farms.
That's right. Some people simply cannot respond to reality when it runs over them with a pavement roller. Here it is:


“But as of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test — that’s the important thing — and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good,” Trump said. (Trump’s mention of “the letter” and “transcription” was a reference to his recent impeachment.) . . . 
He’s wrong. Current supply of the test is limited, and clinicians are the ones who decide whether a patient meets criteria to warrant testing. Testing is not as easy as just calling your doctor or pharmacy, saying you want to be tested for COVID-19 and getting it done.
“Unfortunately, it’s not that simple yet,” said Christopher Mores, a professor of global health at George Washington University.
There is greater availability of tests, but the number of labs involved in the testing process is still limited, Mores said. Testing is expected to increase as more commercial labs participate, but even they have limits in the number of patients who can be tested daily, Mores said.
PolitiFact found news reports of people who wanted to get tested and couldn’t, or of hindrances in the testing process.  Here’s a sample:
Read it yourself if you want to see the sample.

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