You would need more than just a pre-travel testing requirement. You would also have needed an arrival quarantine and post-arrival testing.
I wonder what percent of asymptomatic positive cases pre-arrival testing actually catches. I’m sure that number also changes depending on how many days before traveling you’re allowed to get the test.
And to actually prevent COVID from entering the US, I think you would have needed all of that fully in place in January, or perhaps earlier.
Effectively what this would have meant is a total border closure for several months at the beginning of the year. I’m not sure if that would have literally been impossible, but I think it’s totally fathomable why that didn’t happen.
In January, outside of China (possibly elsewhere in Asia) absolutely everything was business as usual. I was traveling in Europe for 3 weeks at the end of January/beginning of February and everything was 100% normal.
The absolute earliest I could see significant shutting down in the US would have been early March which is when companies started canceling events, etc.
I don't have exact date timelines, but I know the large company I work for decided that the US was a coronavirus hotspot somewhere around the end of February and the beginning of March and banned business travel to or within the US. It was only in mid-March that they shut down the offices themselves, a couple of days before state or local governments began locking down.
I believe the current estimate is that there was uncontrolled community spread in the US by late February, and closing the borders to international travelers wouldn't have done anything to prevent its spread in the US.
I was at a relatively smallish (maybe a few hundred people) tech event in Phoenix the first week in March. There had been some consideration to canceling but they went ahead. They were cleaning surfaces, doing elbow bumps instead of handshakes but no masks, distancing, etc.
I was supposed to head on to another fairly small event in Tahoe the next week but the Thursday before, they canceled it. Which TBH seemed excessive to me at the time. (Though CA was starting to see an increase in cases.) I got home, did some shopping before everything went crazy but about a week later offices were closing, etc.
The Chinese were low key buying up as much medical supplies in Europe as they could get their hands on and flying them to China. This didn't raise any alarms.
The West displayed an enormous level of incompetence same as the Chinese authorities but you can at least understand why the CCP cadre in Wuhan was so negligent. There is something in the human brain that makes people incapable of recognizing danger until they experience it.
Australia has had these measures in place for a while now but quite a while after January and they work pretty well. I think one of the very effective tools Australia has is the ability to close borders with other states. In the US even if one state is doing pretty well, it doesn't matter because people from other states will come in and ruin it.
> You would need more than just a pre-travel testing requirement. You would also have needed an arrival quarantine and post-arrival testing.
Yes, and those are what US has in abundance, but does not use for some reason.
I believe every international airport has quarantine zones, and US has quite extensive TB quarantine infrastructure it could've reused.
Lastly, it could've finally put its incarceration industry to some good use.
It's very much like US found it had many months worth of PPE stockpiles laying forgotten in diffent institutions long after US spent hundreds of millions to rush order it from China.
But indeed this wasn't in place at the start of the pandemic, and New York's ability to enforce it is quite weak.
Do we know if the new US federal order will allow the unreliable rapid tests to meet the requirement? Canada's similar requirement, added last Thursday, insists on either a PCR test or an RT-LAMP test. Edit: the wording in the CDC's FAQ requires a "viral test (NAAT or antigen)". I guess that does include the unreliable rapid kind.
I wonder what percent of asymptomatic positive cases pre-arrival testing actually catches. I’m sure that number also changes depending on how many days before traveling you’re allowed to get the test.
And to actually prevent COVID from entering the US, I think you would have needed all of that fully in place in January, or perhaps earlier.
Effectively what this would have meant is a total border closure for several months at the beginning of the year. I’m not sure if that would have literally been impossible, but I think it’s totally fathomable why that didn’t happen.