Basically, to control the virus early would have required a full shutdown of China travel earlier than the partial shutdown, and a shutdown of European travel when we did the partial China one:https://www.wsj.com/graphics/when-did-covid-hit-earliest-death/?mod=hp_lead_pos5 …
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Only a president obsessed with foreign threats to the point of xenophobia, fixated on borders and travel restrictions as policy tools, and totally unconcerned about elite opinion could have taken those steps. If only we'd had that kind of president.
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On the one hand this is unfair to Trump: I was extremely concerned about the virus and I wasn't calling for those steps. On the other hand the case for Trump was always that he was tougher/bolder/more aggressively America-First than nervous cocktail-party conservatives like me.
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But anyway this is also more evidence that wherever you want to locate Trump's crucial failure re: the pandemic, in most counterfactuals with more normal presidents the initial spread still gets out of hand.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT
This is obviously not true because there are many countries that had many introductions from travel, just like this, and even large outbreaks, and got it under control without anything like China’s shutdowns. There are other proven strategies that work well.
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Replying to @zeynep @DouthatNYT
Many countries are not the global interconnected superpower that is America. NYC has flights going every few minutes to Europe and Asia - just one city.
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You know who has flights every few minutes to everywhere, including the source of the original outbreak? Most of Asia.
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Replying to @zeynep @DouthatNYT
NYC is extremely well connected to Asia and Europe. All early cases in US were Italy and Chinese imports.
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