>it's hard to define Europe if you don't use either Schengen or EU

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.

Ireland and the UK are not part of that "mass of land" :-)

True, but technically both are

- North of the Mediterranean sea

- West of the Ural mountains

- no land route to America

It might include lots of Canadian islands, though. Maybe specify that it needs to be on or east of the mid-Atlantic ridge as well.

If we talk about "mass of land" - and wanna split hairs :) - it does not include the ocean I guess.

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.

Anything east of the Ural mountains is also west of the Ural mountains if you travel far enough. :)

that's why we have invented the concept of "greater distance" :)

So you'd include parts of Russia and Turkey but leave out others? That's gonna be hard to define at the border.

I wonder about British/Irish people.

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.)

The details are unclear anyway. What about Schengen citizens living in the UK? I can imagine they'll generally let people in from UK and Ireland but question them about travel history and maybe proof of residence. Lying to a border agent gets you banned for life, that should be a decent deterrent.

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.

You realize that the U.S. has probably many more infectious areas than Europe?

They certainly do have many but travelers from Europe could still introduce more infection clusters, especially in major cities.

I don't think the people who made this decision are on Hacker News.

> 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?

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.)

it's a legit question which is the pillar of (software) security thinking. It's called parallel or adversarial thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_thinking

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.

We saw many people in Italy fled south by train and car in the hours before quarantine was to be imposed in parts of the north.

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.

> Would the USA know if I flew to the UK, then the USA?

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.

I suspect it is trivial for the US to check who boarded flights across the world, and you left many other digital footprints (payments, cell phone activation, etc). IANAL but I believe that lying to immigration when entering the US is a pretty efficient way to get banned from entering for life.

Since UK isn't in Shengen don't you need to show ID on entry? Surely they record who comes in

All EU citizens (including Irish) and British citizens show a passport or national identity card when entering Britain or Ireland, or when entering the Schengen area.

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?)

"Europe and the UK".

Not that hard, especially when it's a decision where lives can be at stake.

> Excluding the UK and Ireland surely had political reasons

Or maybe it's because Trump owns golf resorts in both countries?

That is obviously also gonna be a reason. But I could imagine that his staff feels more comfortable with Schengen as a zone with (usually) open borders and high infection rates rather than specifying single countries. The latter would probably be harder to keep up in courts.

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.

Dublin has pre-clearing[1] arrangements for entering the US so you can do all your checks in IE. Most of the US companies registered in Europe are in the RoI/UK, which could be reason for why they exclude it. Also whether this makes sense for "containing" is a different question.

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-...