News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days. Parent comment

Re:U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days by autokad on Thursday March 12, 2020 @05:56AM (#22555217)
a lot of people who criticize the ban says its arbitrary, etc etc. go to the site below. you can also sort by total cases / 1m pop. US stopped travel to China while the EU did not, and you can see that in the numbers. Right now, the US has one of the lowest rates in the world: 4 per million.

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.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days by jonathanstrange on Thursday March 12, 2020 @06:27AM (#22555350)
The US is not testing nearly as much as other countries. Two weeks ago it has tested <500 people, as of March 11 the US has tested only 11,079 persons[1].

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/

[ Parent | on HN ]