[sudosysgen]

The WHO absolutely did take a long time to declare a pandemic and certainly did fumble the ball on aerosol transmission.

However given what we now know for sure we can safely say that border closures without an eradication policy (strict lockdowns and mass testing until the cases are undetectable followed by contact tracing) would not have changed anything.

Which is what the models that WHO epidemiologists had used to give the guidance that airport closures would not be very effective used as premises and found.

We know that by the time the border closures were suggested the virus was already definitely already in every country. From then on an extra five or six cases a month don't really affect the trajectory of the epidemic much at all.

Unless you go for an eradication strategy. But in Western states that waited until deaths started mounting to lockdown and then opened back up mostly before they went to zero we can confidently say that airport closures would not have been a factor in avoiding the disaster.

[kortilla]

> However given what we now know for sure we can safely say that border closures without an eradication policy (strict lockdowns and mass testing until the cases are undetectable followed by contact tracing) would not have changed anything.

How do you make the conclusion that without a policy reducing travel wouldn’t have helped? That doesn’t even make sense.

[sudosysgen]

I don't know how your government handled things, but here they waited until it was clear that the healthcare system was going to implode if nothing was done to implement serious restrictions.

If we had stopped travel, we would have hit that point maybe a week or two later. Travel is linear while community spread is exponential.

In the end, given the incredible efficacy of lockdowns, the total amounts of deaths and infected would have been the same or thereabouts, because the point at which it was clear a lockdown was going to happen would just have come sooner.

If you base your public health measures on number of infections, and if community spread is exponential, then adding a dozen cases from travel doesn't change the point at which cases start to decrease, because the cases decreasing is contingent with them reaching a certain amount to begin with.

[rjzzleep]

Couple of points:

1. Lockdown and travel restrictions are not the same.

2. Travel restrictions and reasonable public health safety measure are not exclusive. They only work in conjunction.

I would argue that one of the most damaging things the EU did was take care of these things linearly.

As an example German Pharmacies warned the Government of mask supply issues in February. Maybe even January. I know february because beginning of February they were having those supply issues.

Fun fact, one of the biggest suppliers of machines that are required to make N95 mask threads is German(I think it was german, but could be central European). Yet, just like the US, Germany did not call for domestic mask production until months later. I'm not even sure they did at all seeing how a lot of masks later were cheap chinese masks sold over market value with quality control issues.

Contrast that to Taiwan, where fever wards were established right away, domestic mask production and distribution was increased and regulated, combined with a coherent message and paper contact tracing(i.e. no app to start right away). And before you say "but Taiwan". Yes, Taiwan has a second wave coming that will be way worse than the first one, since the top level government seems to have let arrogance forget a couple of the things they did right early on.

[sudosysgen]

You should re-read my original comment. I said that travel restrictions would not do anything unless the pandemic strategy was eradiction. If the strategy is to "flattien the curve", then there is essentially no effect from closing borders.

>1. Lockdown and travel restrictions are not the same.

Yes, this is the entire point of my argument.

>2. Travel restrictions and reasonable public health safety measure are not exclusive. They only work in conjunction.

This is not correct. Lockdowns work even without travel restrictions. Travel restrictions don't do much without lockdowns (and other non-pharmaceutical interventions).

[rjzzleep]

> You should re-read my original comment. I said that travel restrictions would not do anything unless the pandemic strategy was eradiction. If the strategy is to "flattien the curve", then there is essentially no effect from closing borders.

You should look outside the window there are more countries in the world than just the EU and the USA. Taiwan had effectively zero community transmission for almost a year without lockdown. Travel restrictions were a vital part to that.

The whole flatten the curve argument was a hack to reset a botched pandemic response.

> This is not correct. Lockdowns work even without travel restrictions. Travel restrictions don't do much without lockdowns (and other non-pharmaceutical interventions).

Howd they work out in Europe? How many lockdowns will they have? They actually did Lockdowns without travel restrictions and it did not work. It did flatten the curve a bit, but the end result is still a mess.

Your entire argument is based on an assumption that the outcome is already determined.

[sudosysgen]

This is exactly my argument. I said that unless you have a policy of eradication, travel restrictions are useless.

Taiwan had a policy of eradication. So I don't see how anything conflicts with what I said.

I have many friends and family that lived in Europe. They did real lockdows in the first wave, and it worked. For the second, third and fourth wave, lockdowns were very light and allowed people to go to work and often children to go to school. So they didn't work.

[yorwba]

> Howd they work out in Europe? How many lockdowns will they have? They actually did Lockdowns without travel restrictions and it did not work.

Lockdowns have worked very well in Europe. That's why the reaction to rising cases was always another lockdown, following which case counts fell again. However, the overall strategy was not eradication, so every lockdown so far ended when there were still enough infected to start a new wave. Travel restrictions would have helped keep more infectious strains like B 1.1.7 at bay, but in their absence, already-present strains would have kept spreading anyway.