Flight Bans Don’t Help Much This Late in a Pandemic
Trump’s restriction on passengers from Europe could have slowed the disease’s spread early on, but coronavirus is past that point in the U.S.
Diseases don’t need airplanes to spread.
Photographer: Alex Kraus/BloombergIn 2006, four epidemiologists — two from the U.K., two from the U.S. — published a remarkable study in the scientific journal Nature on “Strategies for mitigating an influenza panic.” For a lay reader, the most compelling parts are the mesmerizing videos, available as quite-large files in the “Supplementary Information” section below the main article (don’t bother trying to watch them on a mobile phone), that show the spread, peak and decline of a hypothetical pandemic over 140 days in the U.K. and 170 in the U.S.
In the U.S., the outbreak starts as a few red pinpricks on the map, spreads slowly for weeks, then quickly explodes over the whole country. Or, as the authors described it, “early spread is focal around seed infections (typically in urban centres) imported from overseas, but rapidly becomes almost homogenously distributed across the whole population.”