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[Bumber]

You'd have a better reason to address the 'travel ban' if it weren't a leaky sieve of a presidential policy that was just a (selective) gotcha against the Asian world (by US definition) to add to prior and unrelated spurious travel bans pre-pandemic (ironically, including bits of the Asian world by UK definition).

Biden admin is doing it to India now (over variant,) so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Starver]

You could argue that Trump was way ahead of the curve[1], and I guess you are doing, which is why I knew it'd be the crux of your argument (little realising you'd go for the other greater baloney too).

Except that the China (or at one point "having set foot in Hubei in the last fortnight") 'ban' was so easy to circumvent in its original form. Ok, compassion to US citizens returning from the hotspot... fairly standard repatriation allowance, even if it was a little short on precautionary quarantining measures. Permanent residents get a by, too, but then that's starting to look like "you're rich, and that means you get to choose which of your varuous habitual territories you get to repatriate to". Being allowed to drag 'immediate family' around, willy-nilly, under the ægis of wealth-based 'immunity' and it just adds to the look of being more sanctions-based, arising from the ongoing political spats, than from any realistic health-protection motives.

The optics were further sullied by the next measure being directed at Iran, suspiciously specifically. Yes, they had a problem building there, but so had (say) Italy yet it was a later phase of restrictions[3] that encompassed the previously liberal travel from Italy. Even when the block was put against Italy, it was only as part of Schengen ("foreign nationals that have set foot in...", with the handy big loopholes as already discussed), though whether the initial delay in adding Anglo/Irish footfall to the mix was a sop to keeping diplomatic boons to the Anglosphere and the marginally-less-hostile-to-Trump-as-an-individual travellers/returnees (slightly more red-votes in it for him) or truly incidence-based is probably undebatable without any additional evidence either way. 'Interestingly', I can't find any obvious record of blocking Russian movements (their famous hard-nosed secrecy still acknowledged early cases derived straight from China, later from Italy, and between that actually did rescue Russian nationals from cruise-ships, properly hospitalising several who had seemingly succumbed at sea) almost as if political quid-pro-quos were still actively being curried with Vlad, slightly more so even than with Boris - but that is of course verging upon speculation.

After March (and continuing on through today) the saturation was such that only the truly lucky/proactive countries (and the downright deniers with a penchent for creative secrecy) could be said to be free/effectively-free of internal infections and community spreading where procedures (or obeyance of procedures) were insufficient. Returnees (probably far more than ill-timed (and unknowingly ill!) tourists, migrants, etc) had already laid down the starting points of internal infection-webs and there was no longer anything 'special' and revolutionary about travel-bans. Arguments over their degree of responsiveness continue, of course. Each country having its own "red-/green-list" dynamically readjusting to events and, give or take the obvious lag involved/amber-list intermediacy of alert, can now be attuned to 'variant' protection - or at least the rise of toponymic variations beyond their 'original' territory can be used to understand where such measures are failing and/or which places might have been economical with the healthcare procedures, record-keeping or ability to convince their population to adapt to circumstances.


Honestly, it was so obvious that India would be affected (once the "hot weather stops it dead" story was quashed, leaving the high population densities as a clear 'winner') that it's probably surprising that Biden took this long to specifically address this (though not that Trump wouldn't put pressure over Modi, even at the tail end of his tenure) given what surely must have been at least made known through the Presidential Briefings even before anything was official/public-domain.

As with the UK, I actually think the US has been tardy in bolstering India's health response (and that of other places comparable in need but not quite as front-page) though the airline "put your own mask on first" principle and the internal creation of the State Of Denial as India's 31st province, alongside Gujarat, Delhi and various Pradeshes, have not been useful. Still, relying on the Serum Institute of Pune exporting towards the Western world (or elsewhere non-Indian to relieve the Western manufacturies from too much non-Western distribution to bolster much needed local availabilities) then discovering that it cannot keep up with the need (especially the sudden knee-jerk one, fostered by prior complacency) seems a bit off. Ironically, it's probably the various self-affirmed anti-globalist camps who were more complicit with this arguably globalism-driven mismatch of need!


Sorry, more ramble. Probably a few things in there that are long-hanging fruit to respond over. Not that I think I'm too wrong WRT the core of the last few prior messages, just where I've gone beyond into peripheral issues and extended metaphors.




[1] Basically all halfway sensible[2] countries are travel-banning against all other currently relevent hotspots, right now and have been doing so, on and off, for much of the last year... Or have more like they've been closing their stable doors very slightly/significantly after the strange infected horses have already wandered in from outside, in far too many moments of suboptimal success.

[2] Or, more accurately, just under half of territories are currently enacting one or other of: a) global travel-bans, or effectively so; b) something including something more specific like "all air-travel"-bans with/without additional subtleties for other border-crossings; c) targetted bans against current countries/regions of concern, to some sufficiently sievey degree that doesn't still give carte-blanche to whole swathes of passport-holders. Of the rest, some are 'back' to their usual over-restrictive borders which works out well as a stopped-clock being currently right and others are using recent-negative-tests and/or compulsary quarantine periods (with/without locally negative tests as landmarks to de-quarantine). It's a hotch-potch of measures that I'm not sure any country can say is exactly right enough about without straying into over-/under-cautiousness to maintaining their respective effective-normality or protectiveness... Often both being wrong simultaneously.

[3] By that time part of the building "half the planet locking down against half-to-all the rest of the planet" response, so not much credit can be given at this point in the procedings, it having been blatantly obvious the 'new normal', and overtaken any possible claims to "prescient hypervigilence". 

[None]

Thanks for the ramble, Starver. It's cohesive and well-thought through.

[delphonso]

Starver is the master of the ramble.

I still can't get a vaccine. My city in China is months behind literally every city around it. Shenzhen has already started to doll out vaccines to the villages (the usually most neglected populations).

Also most people here don't seem to care either way, though, as the virus is under control basically everywhere.

[McTraveller]

My second shot was essentially nothing... so far my arm hasn't even been sore, and it's been 4 days.  Did I get a placebo? Is my daily vitamin D regimen a contributing factor? Do I have an extraordinarily good or bad immune system?

To be fair, I have heard at least one other person in my circle that had basically no effect from the 2nd Pfizer shot. Most others had 1-3 days of feeling awful.

[Doomblade187]

My second shot was essentially nothing... so far my arm hasn't even been sore, and it's been 4 days.  Did I get a placebo? Is my daily vitamin D regimen a contributing factor? Do I have an extraordinarily good or bad immune system?

To be fair, I have heard at least one other person in my circle that had basically no effect from the 2nd Pfizer shot. Most others had 1-3 days of feeling awful.

It happens, seems to be a very personalized experience so to speak. I know people who had a lot of symptoms and some with none.

[Frumple]

Pretty much. You got lucky, take the win and go on making happy mask noises when in public.

[martinuzz]

A study by the US research company Gallup shows that based on the 117 countries surveyed, only 68% of the world's adult population is willing to be vaccinated, if the vaccin is free, that is.

The lowest willingness to be vaccinated is in Europe, with an average of 53%, albeit there are huge differences between eastern and western Europe. In the Balkan countries, the willingness is lowest in the whole world, at a mere 35%.
Northern America also scores pretty low, with 59%.

In Asia, most of the population show willingness to be vaccinated, at 76%.

Virologist estimate that for vaccination to provide effective group immunity, 70-90% of the world needs to be vaccinated, so those low numbers are a real problem.



I guess, to save us from corona, we should start bombing Serbia and Bosnia again, for starters. Perhaps a few Trumpist states as well. I'm sure we can get the UN to label it as a 'humanitarian mission'.

[Vector]

This displeases me.

[Frumple]

Wait, the anti-vax nergal worship (who's ready for wave N+1, whoo) or the humanitarian mission jab?

[Vector]

the newspapers kindly informing us that herd immunity may be off the table

[Sirus]

Was there any doubt, after seeing how people behaved during the worst of the pandemic? The anti-vax, anti-science crowd is more numerous than ever, even on the fringes of those groups you have selfish idiots who just plain don't care, and of course you have certain political figures telling their people that vaccines aren't needed.

I honestly expect covid to become another endemic seasonal illness that we'll need regular updated vaccines against, much like influenza.

[Frumple]

Ah. Yeah, folks have been saying herd immunity actually happening is increasingly unlikely for a... few weeks now, I think? It's either been a bit or dealing with the plague plus a pair of increasingly demented grandparents has finally warped my sense of time sufficiently it just feels like a few weeks. One of those two!

Definitely sucks, though, yup.

[nenjin]

One of my idiot friends is going with the line "Letting things happen the way they were meant to happen."

[None]

Sure there was doubt, but damn if I'd give up hoping to go with it. We can't let covid continue to be a leading cause of death. We have to do better.

Don't get fatalistic. Get mad. I'll let that anger keep me warm at night to keep hope alive. Remember who continues to downplay it while friends and relatives put each other in caskets.