On Friday, the United States passed 500,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. On Saturday, it seems inevitable that the United States will pass Italy and also become the nation with the greatest number of deaths from COVID-19.
Just as the nations of the European Union aren’t all marching forward lockstep when it comes to cases, deaths, or the method for fighting the outbreak, each state in the United States seems to be writing its own story. For rural states with lots of land and small population, that low density itself helps generate a social distancing no matter what the policy of the local officials. For the most densely populated states, even sound policy and early adoption have to work that much harder against an environment that gives the virus optimal possibilities for spread. Success in any state comes from pushing the number of transmissions down to a point where the epidemic can’t be sustained. Many states have done well. Many others less so.
But when it comes to federal action … what federal action? Other than inexplicably grabbing up supplies already purchased by some states, and a daily self-praise session by Donald Trump, just about the only claim that can be made in terms of actions that might have helped is restrictions on travel. And new information on that point makes it clear this didn’t help at all.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he “saved millions of lives” by “closing the border with China” over many objections. Even ignoring the fact that there is no border between the United States and China, and that no one was actually objecting to restrictions on travel at a point where the epidemic was not already well underway, but when several people who had traveled to China had been diagnosed with 2019 novel coronavirus on their return to the United States, there’s another big reason why Trump is simply wrong.
As CNN reports, two research projects looking at both the genetics of the coronavirus found in New York and the epidemiology of the outbreak there, indicate that COVID-19 in New York didn’t come from China. It came from sources both in Europe, and from community circulation that was already occurring in the United States when the outbreak in New York state took off.
This is not surprising. A quick check on a single day in early March showed cases in 23 nations that had originated from trips to Italy alone. As a favored tourist destination, many, many more Americans were visiting areas of Italy that were directly in the heart of the original hot spot there. Visitors were also engaging in many more social activities. Meanwhile, direct transport from the Hubei province to the United States had actually ended well before Trump closed that “border,” by airlines that had suspended travel to the region.
Trump’s later attempt to create a blanket ban against travel from Europe—a restriction that only affected travelers other than American citizens—not only came too late, but was so badly constructed as to be ineffective. Even Trump may recognize this fact, since he rarely mentions how he banned travel to a group of nations many of which did an excellent job at containing local spread of COVID-19. (See Switzerland, which has held total cases under 25,000 and genuinely flattened their curve to small numbers of new cases, or Iceland which has tested an astounding 10% of their population while holding total cases below 2,000).
In any epidemic, travel restrictions are one of the first things that governments are likely to put in place. They’re simple, they seem obvious, and they feed a basic sense of stopping something from “over there.” But these restrictions are uniformly among the least effective controls of any epidemic. And the kind of slow-roll, patchwork implementation issued by Trump has no value outside feeding a xenophobic talking point.
Right-wing sources are increasingly intent on insisting that “every American death can be blamed on China.” There have been calls on Fox News and other outlets for the U.S. to turn its back on the World Health Organization for “cooperating” with China, to impose new sanctions, and to find some way to “retaliate” against China for “killing Americans.”
For the ready racists of the right, this is a perfectly understandable response. It allows them to direct blame away from Trump and pin it on those dirty red communists — it’s not a coincidence that every one of these stories makes sure to mention the word “communist.” But even had Trump closed some actual border with China, even if he had erected a 30,000-foot wall blocking airlines from transiting between Hubei and the U.S., it would have made exactly zero difference.