I was actually thinking Trudeau is telegraphing from his talks with other G7 countries, that other countries are going to close borders soon, and if you want to come home you should move now.
The virus is already essentially everywhere. Closing borders in January might have done something but now I can't imagine there will be much of an effect.
You limit imported new infections and can focus on slowing community spread. Due to the exponential growth rate, this absolutely makes a difference.
In the past few days, Singapore and other countries have announced they are also adopting this strategy. Singapore too has a complex highly-interdependent border situation with neighboring Malaysia and has to make an exception there as well.
My point being that infected already exist here broadly, presumably in every urban area. The small number of people crossing borders wouldn't seem to make any difference, the goal should be on the more local levels of transmissions (closing restaurants or slashing capacity, hygiene requirements, closing schools/workplaces/events, i.e. venues for transmission) risking adding a few infected individuals to a large population of infected individuals seems to be the wrong step, or much much too late.
That's probably not true (yet). From what i have read, there are reports of community spread in bc, alberta, and ontario. That's a lot of Canada but certainly not all of it. If a significant portion of cases are still travel related, closing the border makes sense imo.
If a country had already hit its peak, new infected travelers potentially infecting they came across (customs, transport, at their lodging) might cause new local flareups, no? At which point you might have to wait for a new peak to subside.
Unfortunately (or fortunately because other phenomena are based on this also -- see gossiping protocols), that is true. Once you have a critical population, related with the connectivity of the subgraph, the propagation is self-sustained, that is everyone is going to get infected in a SIR model or similar. One could argue that you might change the curve slope a bit. And I guess that is the bet here.
For one thing, your setup is bad. You simply do not know that to be true.
Your premise is some kind of equality of distribution, which is never going to be the case.
Simple scenario: how about if the US ends up having 20 times as many cases as Canada, while having only 10 times the population.
Cultures - specifically the people that derive from them - are all different. They all behave differently. They will all comply with or violate quarantines differently. They will all spread, or not spread, the virus differently.
Compare Italian touching culture with Germany. Very different cultures.
It's also better to not be responsible for any more foreign citizens than absolutely necessary, during a time of panic, quarantine, national emergency. We do not yet know how bad this is going to get.
I don't understand why people keep repeating the terrible premise that it doesn't matter, when it's so incredibly obvious there are numerous important ways that it matters. The experts are calling for these travel lockdowns, and they're doing it for good reasons.
The parent’s point rings true to me. It’s not so much the spread from country to country as it is the confined space that would concern me. As such, safety of domestic flights and trains should be considered as well.
The virus is already essentially everywhere. Closing borders in January might have done something but now I can't imagine there will be much of an effect.