Banning public gatherings is really something that should be done on the municipal level, maybe the state level. The federal government should not have the power to disrupt every day life from thousands of miles away.

I sympathize with this view, but it does make it harder to respond quickly with nationwide lockdowns, which is the flip side of living in such a connected world.

Long term, I think some mechanism to mandate more social isolation is going to be needed.

For example when travelling from California to Arizona, there is currently no quarantine area or checkpoint, and that's fine if you want free movement, but then it's harder to say that states should run their own pandemic policy as long as there is free movement between states.

And this is a general trade off. More interconnected world => localism is less viable as a means of countering global threats.

Practically, yes, the states these days won't do anything until the federal government tells them to. It'll work out in a nationwide lockdown, but such obedience hurt us in february when the CDC had a monopoly on test kits and nowhere near enough capacity to supply the whole country. We seem to be making all the wrong decisions in this emergency.

Those are valid points. As to the test kits, I keep hearing conflicting info -- e.g. that there was a shortage of ingredients, too much FDA red tape, etc. There will plenty of root cause analysis in the future, but I think we have to reshore critical infrastructure and there is lots of red tape to cut in both CDC and FDA.

The red tape thing is nonsense. What was lacking was/is political will. CDC/FDA/States could increase testing 100-fold overnight if they really wanted to. A decision has been made to proceed differently. Hopefully this decision is reconsidered over the next few days or things are going to get much worse. Currently, as far as I can tell, we are doing about 1000 tests a day nationwide. I can order the necessary reagents and a few water baths and a cheap microtiter plate fluorometer for overnight delivery and do a 1000 of these tests a day by hand.

I have read somewhere that CDC was trying to make a 3-in-1 test kit for SARS, MERS and this new SARS-Cov-2 virus but it was giving bad accuracy and false positives, and now they are making the one for the sars-cov-2 only.

They were making a 3 in 1 kit, but that's because the 1 was an internal control and the other 2 were two different places in the viral genome in case one mutated and became silent.

Can you cite anything to back this up?

Any standard first year undergrad level biology book will describe how to run an RT-PCR test (which is what they are doing). None of the reagents and processes are difficult to make or source.

My personal theory is that someone in the executive branch wanted to secure an exclusive contract for a personal friend. Something similar happened in the first few months of the Kuwait oil fires, with certain american fire fighting firms being given exclusive contracts to fight the fires, despite lacking the technology and expertise to extinguish them.

But I'm just a cynical man. It could very well be something else and I'll be very interested to read about this emergency once it's all behind us.

Could be, think of Homeland Security and those new(er) airport scanners. Mike Chertoff, formerly Secretary of Homeland Security, was instrumental in making them happen. He also happened to own a huge stake in the company that made them, since acquired by BAE Systems (who later made him a Chairman).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff

Even with an exclusive contract, a nation such as the US should be able to quickly ramp production of all the test kits, masks, latex gloves, respirators, oxygen concentrators, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals that we need.

Yet we can't.

That's crazy and it has to change.

Oh we certainly can. "We" have decided not to, for now. One day we might find out the who/why/how of this decision. That will be an interesting day.

The who is pretty much everyone in government, egged on by the business community with the tacit approval or at least disinterest of the public. The when is constant over the past half century. The how is outsourcing much of our productive capability around the globe. The why is the race to the bottom for the cheapest production cost.

I don't think so. This is not a case like where we need a bunch of steal but the steel mills are closed so we have to buy the Chinese steel so (as any good business-folks will do) they raise prices 8-fold (see Oakland Bay Bridge Fiasco). The reagents for these tests are all made in america, or would take a few days to ramp up. I once made enough Taq polymerase in 12 hours to supply a lab for 12 years doing 200 PCRs a day. A single person can make gram quantities of the required oligos (enough for 100,000 PCR reactions) in any one of 500 labs in the Bay area alone in 12 hours. RT takes an hour. Amplification takes 4 hours. The readout for a sample can be done 1500 at a time in one second. There are no excuses.

> exclusive contract for a personal friend

Similarly in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, a politically connected one-man "energy company" called Whitefish, with no experience or skills, emerged out of nowhere and was given the contracts to rebuild the entire Puerto Rican grid.

Months later nothing had happened other than he hired a few people as unskilled as himself who were just dorking around down there, while people died.

So they fired that guy and hired another company called Cobra, with the same terrible terms, and the same ineffective response. Eventually it was found out that Cobra people had paid massive bribes to officials to ensure the deal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/puerto-rico-fema-arres...

Whitefish was getting stuff done. It was more than one man. It had the needed skill, which was subcontracting. Whitefish got numerous teams operational in Puerto Rico before being yanked off the job by politics.

The whole story of Whitefish being unqualified is just corrupt politics. Subcontracting is a legitimate way to get the work done.

Exactly. And blanket policies are almost always terrible. Local communities have different constraints and different environments. There's no reason to believe that Fargo, North Dakota should have to respond to this in the same way that New York City does.

A virus spreads just as easily in a crowded room in Fargo as it does in NYC.

China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong King all slowed the curve, and have rules governing their whole country.

Singapore and Taiwan are basically cities, very dense. China is a Communist country with all kinds of totalitarian policies. South Korean cases are still climbing at more than 100 a day. You can't tell precisely what the growth curve has been because there's going to be a higher bias when they ramp up testing in many countries.

At any rate, no, a town that has 50 people per square mile should not be forced to respond in the same way as some city with 50,000 people per square mile. In the meantime, the people of Fargo have all the relevant information and their local officials can make calls as needed to suit their demands.

The rule "no gatherings over 250 people" isn't a blanket rule. It will impact cities more than rural places. The flexibility is already built into the schema.

Because the virus respects county boundaries?

> I'm declaring that the MLB season needs to be delayed

The NBA just suspended their season "until further notice".

During the Blackhawks game, the announces claim that the official NHL stance is unclear and they will be making an announcement tomorrow. They had 21k in attendance at the game tonight.

Right and it wasn't the president's decision. Not sure what your point is.

"An observation of something that was presently occurring that had some relevance to the discussion".

>All reductions in (non-essential) travel are good in a pandemic.

All travel is essential to somebody. All restrictions on movement also have a cost, and any analysis that only looks at the benefits of something without looking at the costs cannot hope to be correct.

I'm curious to the downvoters, do you generally believe it's a good idea to make public policy decisions without considering the downsides? It's like people who want to ban encryption because it could marginally increase the number of terrorists caught.

Of course we should consider the downsides when we make public policy decisions. In fact, if we weren't, we wouldn't be making decisions at all but merely reacting.

But we can consider the downsides and decide that we want to restrict travel.

I don't actually need to go visit my rellies. I want to, but I don't have to. On the other hand, if I go on a voluntary trip, I probably have to return home because I can't really afford a hotel indefinitely into the future.

So it's obvious to me that there is some distinction between necessary and nice to have.

I genuinely have been underwhelmed by the reaction to this disease through much of the world. It is necessary in a constitutional democracy to react sometimes to maintain the trust of the voters - or they might say "A democracy is fine when things are going well, but when the chips are down we need a strong leader who can make the decisions we need". Saying "those entertainment business can't open during this outbreak", "keep your tables at least a metre apart" and "don't travel" are reasonable reactions in this circumstance. And we need democratic leaders so that they can know when it's gone on for too long and they have to accept we can't stop it - something a "strong leader" can't tell.

> All travel is essential to somebody

I travelled to starbucks today. I’d hardly consider that essential.

What about to your job, if you don't have a job that you can do remotely? Employers generally don't like paying people who can't make it in to work, and it's hard to pay for food without money.

Even if employers were happy to pay the wages, most small employers aren't going to be able to keep going when incoming cashflow goes to zero

I assume the U.S. government will be pumping money directly into the hands of small businesses and employees.

You assume a hell of a lot.

Aye, just got back from walking there. Pretty essential to doing IT for several hours, though, IMO.

But OPs point stands -- unless you're working from home and never going out to eat / get groceries / not go crazy from cabin fever you have to travel somewhere

I haven't tasted coffee in a decade, and I'm doing just finezzzzzzzz....~

Restricting routine trips to just home-to-work, work-to-home, and large-scale resupply missions is still acceptable at the moment. Make use of your local grocery's picker service with delivery to the parking lot, if you can.

Consider switching your dining-out trips to ordering via phone, fax, or electronic ordering system, and doing drive-through, carry-out, or parking-lot pickup. Pay electronically, in advance, instead of handling cash at the point-of-sale terminal. If you get cabin fever, and need to socialize, do it through screens.

It is essential for Starbucks to serve customers in order for them to stay in business. You don't have to stop going. But you can put in your order via website or app; walk into the retail location only when it's ready; pick it up without speaking to, breathing on, or touching anyone; and then leave immediately. It is possible to minimize the duration and intensity of contact, without eliminating it entirely.

It is better to be in contact with your regular friends, acquaintances, and business associates--that are all the same people every day--than to have a lot of transient contacts with complete strangers. It is slower to traverse a social network one connection at a time than to hit a lot of random, unconnected people all at once with a brodcast.

> All travel is essential to somebody.

Not at all.

> even if congress were to pass a law banning such gatherings, there would be first amendment implications

Isn't there an obvious compelling state interest?

There's always a "compelling state interest" when it comes to violating the bill of rights.

Counter-example: "You may not print that--the President doesn't like dad jokes."

The hurdle would then be that it’s the feds’ responsibility to prove that this is the smallest infringement that would accomplish the government’s intention.

Strict scrutiny requires not only a compelling state interest but that the restriction be narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means that satisfies the purpose. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny .

Something I've never been clear on... what can and can't be banned through executive order?

> ... the US has a problem as it granted the President broad discretionary powers to suspend international travel but not domestic gatherings, which can't be banned via executive order and even if congress were to pass a law banning such gatherings, there would be first amendment implications as well as federalism issues.

I don't know how strong that actually is. Over the past few years, we've seen some Trump work the courts pretty consistently. Even if his administration is doing something explicitly unconstitutional, running something all the way to the Supreme Court can take 6 to 18 months, during which time the unconstitutional order would stand (if not stayed early on).

OP's point wasn't "this is only going to have very limited effect", to which your reply "better than nothing" would be appropriate.

Their point is that there's absolutely no effect of banning travel between two areas with similar prevalence, based on rather simple logic.

Take two bags with mostly white and a similar number of red balls in them. Then, twenty times, grab one hand from each bag and empty it in the other. What's the expected change in number of red balls?

First infections are not uniformly distributed. Second, by the nature of travel people get into close contact with more and more importantly different people than usual. 200 people sitting in an aircraft for 2 hours is inherently more risky than 200 people sitting in a theater for 2 hours as aircraft mix people from wider geographic areas. So, regardless of infection rates, this is beneficial for both Europe and the US at the same time.

Multiple cities with hundreds of thousands of people in both the US and Europe are infection free right now. Extending that for even a few weeks is very useful.

This is false. Any reduction in travel is going to have a positive effect. The best situation is for people to reduce their exposure to other people and to stay at home. If they do need to be exposed to others, the best is for them to be exposed to the same set of people all the time, and not to different sets of people.

This seems not fully worked out. Assuming total travel is constrained, selectively limiting travel to particular areas concentrates travel in the remaining areas, which increases the average number of contacts between travelers, which violates your “reducing exposure to other people is best” rule of thumb.

By your model, some reductions in travel ought to have a negative effect. Is that a fair corollary?

There’s no such thing as a fixed amount of travel, and constraining it on one way concentrates it in another. That makes no sense. Constraining travel will reduce travel, which will reduce interactions between people, which will reduce the spread of the virus. We know this empirically from previous outbreaks and countermeasures.

The pressure / desire to travel is also dropping sharply, though.

Limiting all Schengen traffic is an extreme example, but it's not obvious that some level of restriction would necessarily produce a significant bottleneck effect (given that citizens are exempt).

Why would you assume total travel is constrained? Restricting travel from Europe to US will just eliminate that portion of travel, not concentrate it in the US.

There is an effect, because traveling itself creates chances for exposure. Anyone traveling on an airplane or train in close quarters, or passing through an airport or transit facility, can pick up or pass on an infection.

By your last analogy, the red balls would have paint rubbed off them in the exchanges.

Yes, but then we should be canceling all flights in the US (we should be). Only canceling flights to Europe is a tiny fraction of what's actually necessary here.

It’s a matter of timing. Europe has higher concentrations of the virus than the US. The chances that a plane from Europe contains an infected individual are getting quite high.

When the concentrations in the US get higher it will start to make sense to constrain travel more over there. Right now the chances a domestic flight contains an infected individual is quite low, but that won’t always be the case.

Bear in mind the virus cannot be stopped, or contained at this point. All we can do is slow it down while also limiting the harm our countermeasures cause.

It's not clear the US does have fewer proportions of actual cases, just fewer tested ones.

Saying the virus cannot be stopped seems defeatist. China seems to have managed it locally, albeit with some very aggressive measures.

It’s only a matter of time before it starts over there again, even if through back-propagation from other countries. Everyone’s talking as though China solved the problem. Incredible.

They don't need to solve the problem, just keep the infection rate slow enough to be controlled medically. And then keep everything locked down enough until we can get a vaccine produced. Admittedly, a gargantuan task, and I don't think it's going to happen anywhere else.

They don't need to do that either, they could just let more people die.

That's what you're proposing, if you don't realize it. If you get the growth rate below 1, you can wipe out the disease, instead of merely delaying it.

Apart from the other two replies, the corollary of your point is that travel from a lower incidence area to a higher incidence area actually reduces the risk in the latter.

But this is clearly false because population density is another important factor for contact between people.