[jackson1way]

Just de-boarded and re-boarded an aircraft going to Europe from NY because of this „small“ missing „detail“ in the initial announcement. 4h delay and the people who de-boarded the plane initially, are not re-boarding because they probably left the airport by now, not knowing they had wrong information. Ouch.

[miked85]

The most important detail that was missed, it seems, is that this doesn't go into effect until midnight on Friday 03/13.

[chvid]

The president says that clearly in his address.

However the stuff about cargo being included is really odd. As if he was freestyling rather than reading.

Other than that; I fail to see the point of this. There is already community spread in the US and the UK. The ban seems arbitrary and politicized.

[toyg]

> As if he was freestyling rather than reading.

Or as if he had problems reading, which we know he likely has.

[tlb]

Is that departure time or arrival time?

[wheelerwj]

people aren't worried about leaving, they were worried about coming back.

[forkexec]

Which timezone?

[toyg]

I expect the natural answer is EDT (Washington DC time) but it's an extremely legitimate question in a country as big as the US and it should have been stated more clearly by the Dyslexic In Chief.

[forkexec]

Mea culpa. Makes sense when someone can't distinguish between themselves, their business and a country, so it would never be UTC. That would be too convenient for other people.

[needmoney04]

Does anybody know for certain if friday midnight means friday 00:00 am or friday 11:59 pm? Basically, start of day friday or end of day?

[squiggleblaz]

Midnight never refers to 11.59pm, which is one minute before midnight. I can say that for certain.

Normally I would take "midnight on Friday" as an instant to mean 2400, since if you're somewhere at 1am on Saturday morning you wouldn't consider it a problem to say "we were out partying on Friday night", but if you were there at 11pm on Friday night you would consider it a problem to say "we were out partying on Saturday night.

However in the particular case of something beginning, I would normally take take it to mean "the very start of Friday according to legal time".

Likewise, in the particular case of something ending, I would normally take it to mean "the very end of Friday according to legal time".

[tremon]

Dutch media reports "night from Friday to Saturday", so it's the latter. But that still leaves the open question in which timezone the 11:59 is in (and whether that's a static timezone, or based on local time at departure/arrival), and whether the 11:59 refers to actual or planned time of departure/arrival.

[jbigelow76]

4h delay and the people who de-boarded the plane initially, are not re-boarding because they probably left the airport by now, not knowing they had wrong information.

For those that live in the US and de-boarded because of this "missing detail", I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet.

[MegaButts]

> I wouldn't be surprised if in a week or two they don't feel like they dodged a massive bullet.

I'm guessing you didn't mean this to be a double negative? In other words:

> I would be surprised if in a week or two they feel like they dodged a massive bullet

but I suspect you meant the opposite?

[jbigelow76]

Correct; it's an incorrectly worded, flippant, emotional response to my view of my country's (the US) response to the crisis and not a statement that those that are/were travelling to Europe shouldn't.

[goodside]

This is known as “negative concord” and shows up often in colloquial English. While popularly associated with African American and Appalachian dialects, it actually occurs almost everywhere English is spoken. (E.g. Pink Floyd’s chorus, “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control”.)

Even in formal writing, double negatives are common using “nor”. Consider the sentence, “He is not satisfied at all with the recommendations of Mr. Trump, nor with those of Mrs. Clinton.” If you change “nor” to “or”, the meaning remains identical. This shows the negative “nor” reiterates rather inverts the prior negation. Note the “nor” version is no less formal or professional in tone because of its double negative.

Negative concord even has precedent in Shakespeare: “I never was, nor never will be” from Richard III.

Most would suggest avoiding negative concord in a formal writing (excepting “nor”), but colloquially it’s been part of the language for hundreds of years. In a conversational context, the line you quoted is standard English with or without the “don’t”.

[squiggleblaz]

That sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I've never heard negative concord in this context.

Most people would just accept it as getting confused about the number of negatives in a sentence - as indeed did the op.

Not everything is simply informal grammar; real fleshy human beings do get confused when they try complicated sentences like double negatives.

[goodside]

> This sounds like a misplaced and ideological canned response, since I’ve never heard negative concord in this context.

You have a misplaced trust in your instincts. The following examples of this exact double-negative construction (“...wouldn’t be surprised if ... didn’t...”) are quoted from newspapers and BBC specials:

> But the seeds have been sown and I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't try, once she's feeling more confident herself, to persuade him into the deep end.

> "I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see there are a couple of days with some good news and very, very positive market news," Houge said, noting potential days of 10 percent spikes.

> "I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't lose $157,000 in taxes," Van Tuinen said.

> It was late, and I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't leave some of his audience back down the road somewhere impaled on point number 10 or 11.

Here’s a quote of John F. Kennedy using this construction in a recorded interview:

> President Kennedy: That's what I think. I would have been impeached. I think they would have moved to impeach. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't move to impeach right after this election, on the grounds that I said … and didn't do it … and let … I mean, I'd be …

I Googled these examples in five seconds. You could have too, but instead you chose to lob insults and embarrass yourself.

[dang]

(This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552902)

[cylinder]

It's so dumb, immediate family members not applicable -- so check-in agents are now going to be in the business of examining birth certificates?

[anigbrowl]

Imagine trying to perform TSA test procedures for terrorist activity (millions of people still removing their shoes in airports every day because one guy tried and failed to blow up his own shoes in 2001 WTF), while also trying not to spread COVID-19. Perhaps instead of pat downs they'll do interpretive dances.

[remarkEon]

I'm guessing we're going to get a lot of these sentiments over the next couple weeks (months?), about how these restrictions are interfering with the comforts of modern life.

Let it stand as a reminder of how good we have it, and how fragile things actually are. It's a pandemic. There's going to be some bumps.

[hcknwscommenter]

The ridiculous part of this whole travel ban 3.0 is that it is totally unnecessary. If the U.S. had proper testing infrastructure, we could test every single person arriving from abroad and make them wait the 4 hours required to get a read. S. Korea has that type of testing infrastructure. We invented the darn technology. There are no excuses for the deplorable, laughable, incompetent, disgraceful (I could go on) roll out (actually lack thereof) of testing in the U.S. As best I can tell, we now (today) have capacity to test about a 1,000 samples a day? Unbelievable. Give me three water baths, any old microtiter plate fluorometer, and enough tubes and reagents and I can run 1,000 samples a day by hand.

[makomk]

Testing every single person arriving from abroad wouldn't work. The test is not reliable for people still in the incubation phase, and with exponential spread being what it is there are going to be a lot of those. I don't think there's any country on the planet taking that approach; they're all either banning travel from affected countries or forcing a 14-day quarantine period on travellers from them. The American media seems to have oversold people on how powerful testing is for domestic political reasons.

Also, 4 hour turnaround testing is really hard and I don't know of anywhere other than South Korea has managed it. They basically have to process the tests on site after collecting samples to achieve that, which is no easy feat as it requires not only specialised equipment and trained staff but also a carefully set up positive pressure room to prevent sample contamination. Plus, one of the key things that makes South Korea's approach so effective is that people drive up, get a sample taken, then immediately drive home to avoid spreading the disease to anyone else rather than waiting around for results.

I haven't even seen any examples of countries with substantial travel from Europe that routinely test people who've been there recently and developed mild potential symptoms. South Korea probably could but I haven't seen any confirmation that they do; they mostly seem to be focused on contact tracing and the large local outbreak. The UK and Europe don't. Maybe China does? Again, the American media has been running stories making it sound like the fact the US isn't testing everyone with a cough and a sniffle puts them massively behind the rest of the world and confusing people about what the rest of the world is actually doing.

[lenkite]

They don't have a serological test yet. The test uses RNA extraction. So, the testing all over the world is time consuming and testing kits are expensive. I don't think this is just a US problem.

[hcknwscommenter]

You are just wrong. RNA extraction is dead simple. The basic extraction technology dates to the 1980s. The extraction reagents are (or at least very much can be) very simple ad very cheap chemicals like trizol reagent.

[T-A]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51836898

[La1n]

For the people that don't like clicking links:

>Nearly 20,000 people are being tested every day for coronavirus in South Korea, more people per capita than anywhere else in the world.

>The whole process from test tube to test result is about five to six hours.

[jaclaz]

Then, the first positive result that you get should mean that the whole plane is at risk, after all we are talking of people that have been jammed together on the plane for some 8 hours (on the same recirculating air) and then kept (possibly also jammed together) for another 5-6 hours at the airport to wait for the results, that is - from what I can understand of the way the virus is transmitted - the perfect environment to diffuse the virus.

The only meaningful way I can imagine (not doable in practice) is having travelers lodged at a departure airport hotel, and be tested before taking the flight.

[vogatt]

This (the recirculation part) is likely less tragic than it seems.

Air recilculated on the airplane goes through a HEPA filter and the whole air is exchanged every 3 minutes. HEPA filters are able to catch the virus as far as I know.

source: https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/630300-coved-19-recircul...

[bryanrasmussen]

I don't know it seems like it might be dumb to make an exception that would be hard to check and thus might be hard to apply and would mean that anyone who didn't want their comforts interfered with could say "I'm an immediate family member!"

But I guess the ethical will follow the rules and be uncomfortable, and the unethical won't, as per standard operating procedure.

On Edit: Why the downvote?

[forkexec]

The idiocracy has landed. Welcome to Stupidville, population (we can't count higher than 5).

[squiggleblaz]

It actually happens, in some hotels around the world, that they will demand a marriage certificate if they're sus. So an Indonesian marriage certificate is like a passport.

[eveningcoffee]

The people who went home just won the lottery ticket.

[Tepix]

They did?

[eveningcoffee]

Depending on to which country they intended to travel exactly but all the western side of Europe is on the brink of COVID-19 explosion. Germany, France and Spain are just 7-10 days behind Italy based on number of corona virus infections. The rest are possibly around 2 weeks behind, I have not run the numbers for every country (disclosure: I am not a medical professional, my estimates are based on simple time series but at this stage of the infection these have been proven to be accurate enough).

[squiggleblaz]

Yay! I'm in Germany! The authorities here don't seem to care). I was trying to buy some food yesterday and there were massive queues hanging outside various apparently crowded social venues.

At least I work from home and my wife has been told they have to start wfh tomorrow.

[majewsky]

Fellow German here. It's not that the authorities don't care. They're just putting "avoid panic" as their #1 priority above "contain the outbreak". Large events and gatherings are getting shut down, just not as vigorously as would be prudent.

[dTal]

You're assuming that the USA isn't.

Just because nobody's being tested in the US, doesn't mean nobody's infected; there are unquestionably tens of thousands of undiagnosed cases.