Hence when HHS sent untrained staff with zero protection to meet all the infected people and then they returned all over the country afterwards on commercial flights, they essentially screwed the entire USA in one easy step, practically malicious idiocrasy.

When was the last time you think they sanitized anything at TSA?

The tool takes this into account and lets you adjust the mean time before symptoms show (and the proportion who carry the virus without any symptoms).

Are you also going to quarantine every pilot and flight attendant for two weeks each time they land, given their close proximity to possibly infected passengers? What is the point of a quarantine if it’s been shown we can’t reliably detect all cases (when dealing with such volumes)?

Even some simple recommendations from leadership (CDC) would be encouraging to see, but we keep being fed a “nothing to see here, no need to panic” politicized message.

Meanwhile, events like HIMSS (~50000 attendees from 90+ countries meeting in Orlando March 9-13 to sell overpriced antiquated health tech software to one another and hear the likes of HHS Secretary Alex Azar deliver keynotes) are likely to be a catalyst for pandemic.

Which recommendations are you missing? (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/get-your...)

And the advice not to panic comes from medical experts.

WHO defines “mass gatherings” as amplifiers of transmission of COVID19.

The recommendations you linked are basic infection prevention measures, but the fact is that being within 3 feet of someone infected with COVID19 (even asymptomatic) is enough to contract the virus.

Selective travel bans would seem to be just as effective for this, and a lot more practical.

This sounds like moralizing to me.

>including loss of life

How would temporarily not issuing tourist visas kill people?

It's not security theatre when it's that effective. It provides real benefits in terms of slowing the spread of the disease.

Wouldn't the prudent step be to globally announce a two-week quarantine of all arriving passengers?

The practicalities of that make it pretty difficult. And it means that large numbers of people who don't have the disease will be kept near those who do, meaning some of them are likely to die. (As happened on the cruise ship). I don't think the morals and ethics of this are as obvious as you are making out.

Quarantines just buy you a little extra time. If there is no vaccine, the inevitable always arrives.

I was in Africa when all that went down.

The huge difference here is that the West didn't really care about giving a not-completely-tested drug to Africans in the middle of nowhere.

I don't believe they'll accept that for their own important citizens.