Well they should have accounted for this! They should work hard to get through this, not expect handouts! /s
As sad as the outcome might be death-wise, I hope this pandemic ripping through the US makes us realize how broken our systems are and how instead of spending trillions on military we should be spending money on our collective wellbeing.
Cutting waste is certainly something we need to do better, but let’s be honest about the product we’re getting (that nobody else is capable of producing much less giving away for free) for our military budget.
I believe anyone who's been to the Schengen Area in the past x days faces the ban. Excluding the UK and Ireland surely had political reasons (the UK now also has >400 cases) but it's hard to define Europe if you don't use either Schengen or EU (both of which the UK isn't a part of).
The mass of land resting North of the Mediterranean sea and West of the Ural mountains from which there is no land route to America.
- North of the Mediterranean sea
- West of the Ural mountains
- no land route to America
Remember that UK is very close to continental Europe
Strait of Dover is just 33 km wide.
One could almost swim from one side to the other.
And there's a tunnel connecting the two, you can already go by train from France to UK.
Ireland and UK are even closer than that (about 20kms)
And they are all the same "mass of land" as in tectonic plate.
Iceland for example cannot entirely be considered Europe, the Eurasian plate cut it exactly in a half.
Passports for EU citizens aren't stamped anywhere in the EU. I live in Denmark. Would the USA know if I flew to the UK, then the USA?
(I don't intend to do this.)
In the end, it's not like a terrorism threat where the ones trying hardest are the ones you need to catch. Here, keeping 99% out can suffice easily, esp if the others are also questioned and are getting temperature checks.
This kind of question is a weird one to me. It's like "oh, marijuana prohibition hasn't worked so we should tax it and regulated it".
If you're breaking the law, there's sanctions. You may or may not get caught, and you may or may not be penalised, but that imperfection doesn't decide if it's valid or not. The jails in every country have murderers in them, but murder has been illegal since time immemorial. No-one proposes that we allow murder because with the prohibition we simply wind up with people in prison.
And there's a big difference between free movement of people versus a limited funnel of people. If it's still early enough, that could make the difference between something that is containable and something that is not, and it might make the difference between ICUs that can cope with the peak and being completely overwhelmed. (However, I think the horse has already bolted on this one.)
what would work in that case is take the Channel Tunnel to England, then lie about how long you've stayed in the UK. It probably wouldn't work if you have taken a flight out/in the EU in the past months as that would show up to any customs official.
I wouldn't be surprised if some people in Europe are making similar "escape plans" via the UK, if they feel they need to be in the USA for some reason.
As an example: a parent of an international student, whose university in the USA has just been shut down.
I would imagine they will have you fill in a recent travel form. And make it clear that you'll be in a lot of trouble if you don't answer truthfully.
The document is checked, but it is not stamped. GB/IE←→Schengen checks used to be very simple — often just a glance, no checking the chip or swiping the passport in a reader. Often it was just one or two customs people standing by the gate and looking at each document, not even with a desk. Now (since the refugee thing?) they do swipe the document on the passport-reader-machine.
I assume an electronic record is kept (at least for some period of time), and it is surely shared within the EU+GB, but I don't know if it would be shared to the USA.
(If the situation were reversed, would the USA tell the EU about American citizens who've crossed the US/Canada border using their driving license?)
Not that hard, especially when it's a decision where lives can be at stake.
Or maybe it's because Trump owns golf resorts in both countries?
FWIW, without making this political, I don't even think it's the golf resorts. US and UK have very close economical links, there's a lot of business traffic. Esp by wealthy people flying NYC-London regularly. I would rather think he didn't want to affect those. I can imagine a lot of his friends would've been angry if NYC-London gets shut down. Most visitors to his resorts in Europe will be from the continent anyway. But that's obviously pure speculation.
If you have ever traveled to US via Dublin before you will never want to travel from another airport after.
[1] > Dublin Airport is one of only a handful of airports outside North America that offers a US Preclearance facility. The benefit is that having cleared USCBP, passengers arriving in the US are treated as domestic arrivals, allowing them to avoid immigration queues upon arrival and pick up their bags and go. https://www.dublinairport.com/flight-information/travelling-...
It makes him look like a "strong leader" in front of his base and lends an appearance of "we don't stop from drastic measures even it hurts the economy" (which he was accused of before).
Any time a talking-head goes in front of a camera, the only question that should be asked is "how many tests did we do today, yesterday? ... where is the data for it?". Without the transparency for the numbers of tests all other measures are just a distraction. Anyone who speaks about stuff before these numbers are public knowledge needs to be kicked off the air and down the street (metaphorically).
Also reporters who engage them and do not insist on extracting the numbers before continuing the conversation are complicit.
If you want to call Trump for a mistake, it was not banning travel from EU sooner, when they themselves didn't ban travel to China.
With this amount of testing the numbers you're referring to are completely meaningless. The number of infections is artificially kept low by limiting testing. Hundreds of thousands could be infected, the disease is growing exponentially, and there could be thousands of hospitalizations soon. I'm going so far as to say that there will be thousands of hospitalizations in the US soon and the death toll will soon climb rapidly.
For comparison, Italy has tested 60,761 people as of March 9 [2], and Germany, for instance, has started randomized testing of the population as part of the yearly random influenza testing.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing-in-us.html [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/
The efficacy of this travel ban is questionable (given all these exceptions such as one for UK. Can people coming from other parts just have a layover in UK and be get permission to enter the US?). But lets give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did so in good faith.
It is what's not in the speech that was very very concerning. - No mention of how / when / if people can get tested. - No mention of any plan to handle the economic situation. What happens when businesses in Tourism and restaurants run out of their runway and have to layoff people? What happens to hourly workers who get sick? - No assurance to encourage undocumented residents to go for testing if they experience symptoms. - No mention of large public events. Many local governments and private organizations are doing so in an ad-hoc ways. A consistent voice would literally save lives here.
Their team seems to be singularly focused on 'winning the narrative' or 'spinning' properly than anything else... Well, I guess this is just my opinion.