No Americans, please — EU shuts out travelers from U.S. as it reopens to more than a dozen countries, by Barbara Kollmeyer.
Surprising almost no one, the European Union on Tuesday left the United States off its list of countries whose residents will be able to travel into the 14-bloc nation without travel restrictions.
Citizens of Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, Uruguay and China, “subject to confirmation of reciprocity,” will all be able to travel to the EU as of July 1. Also on the list are Algeria, Morocco, Georgia, Montenegro, Rwanda, Serbia and Tunisia.
The US has made an almighty mess of covid policy. Too slow to react, then it paid the price of lockdown but did not reap the benefit of crushing the curve — because of swamp sabotage, leaving the borders open to incoming virus. Even the UK and Canada eventually figured that out, and are now crushing the curve.
Is it a coincidence that this harmful policy failure occurred when there was a non-left president, a leftist swamp, and a presidential election year?
It is not inevitable that most everyone ends up catching a virus. Rabies, HIV, the black plague, and ebola are all viruses that have been dealt with by quarantine and lockdown. Sure, covid is not as lethal, but if you don’t take it seriously you get mass graves. As Brazil’s President is finding out, it’s not “a little flu”.
The US anti-lockdown sites are again circulating biased studies that imply that huge percentages of the public have unknowingly already caught covid and are immune. Unbiased studies show no such thing. Of course you will find lots of unconfirmed cases if you stick up a sign to come and get free testing — those who know they might be sick come forward, and those who are pretty sure they are healthy won’t go near you near for fear of catching it. Sampling a young and healthy population will find few confirmed infections and a relative abundance of unconfirmed infections. Conversely, if you sample a nursing home after covid has been through, you’ll get a very different result. The mischief comes when extrapolating biased studies to the whole population — that’s misleading at best. Unbiased studies — by selecting people at random and testing them, as per opinion polling — showed in April that about a quarter of cases are unconfirmed, a half are asymptomatic, and a quarter have only minor symptoms. With increased testing, the fraction of undetected cases drops. The number of US confirmed cases is currently 2.7 million, so maybe 10 million Americans have been infected. That’s 3% of the population.
The cost-benefit balance of lockdowns is unclear and will probably never be obvious, because of the health and economic co-morbidities. Apart from possible death, we don’t yet know the health effects of catching the virus. Reports of organ and neurological damage in most patients are emerging. We don’t know the economic costs yet either. The crash of the debt-ridden economy was going to happen anyway, but covid-induced MMT has brought it forward.
It’s becoming clearer (see the graph above, for example) that the US is on a fundamentally different trajectory from the developed world regarding COVID. The rest of the West and east Asia has contained the virus — crushed the curve — but the US is flailing.
This reminds me of the Great Depression. The US economic malaise that began in 1929 was only “lifted” by WWII, or perhaps only when the postwar economy boomed. But in the rest of the West, the Great Depression was much less severe and pretty much over by 1933. Few Americans know that. The left have told everyone what a great President the socialist “New Deal” President Roosevelt was. No, he caused the US immense harm and prolonged the Depression unnecessarily, for nearly a decade. But the left rule academia and the media, so most people have no idea. I wonder how the covid failure will be spun?
