Biden enacts India Travel ban

[politicallefty]

I certainly hope so. I think we should enforce strict travel bans on any country with a major outbreak. The top of that list includes India and Brazil. If there's going to be a serious viral mutation, it's going to happen there. I'm very concerned about the situation in India. A country that size and with that density could see total cases and deaths more than the rest of the world combined. We could send our entire surplus vaccine stockpile and it wouldn't make a dent due to their sheer numbers. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can to help. Apart from humanitarian aid, we need to close off the borders with some of these countries.

I think these travel bans should work both ways. We should be forbidding people from this country from going to those countries, except on an extremely limited basis (I would include humanitarian aid in that exception). This isn't anything like Trump and his Muslim ban. We need to look at the data itself. I would've supported a strict travel ban with Italy, Spain, and France a year ago. I don't really care which area of the world we're talking about. For example, the US-Canada border is still closed to non-essential travel.

[politicallefty]

It's ironic that through this entire crisis, the US under Trump had one of the laxest border controls in the world. Most other countries banned all foreigners, and those allowed entry were subject to mandatory quarantine at their expense.

It's such an indictment of Trump's total incompetence as the leader of his own movement that he never thought to use COVID as a "told you so" about his travel bans. Imagine if in January he had shut down all travel to and from China and then later the Euro "socialist" countries. Liberals would have thrown a fit only for the rest of the world to then get ravaged by COVID while the US had only a couple cases that fell though the cracks that Trump could vilify as rule breakers and Chinese spies. It would have been such a victory for America First and right-wing politics generally with Trump practically guaranteed a second term. But Trump was just too self-absorbed and uninterested to even care.

When Covid first started showing up in the news, right-wing conspiracy sites like 4Chan were some of the first to actually take it seriously. They examined the infection rate, criticized China for lying about the danger of the virus, and spouted schizophrenic rumors about how the virus was "population control" by the elites. Then as soon as world governments started taking it seriously, their narrative immediately flipped, and they began calling Covid a "hoax" designed to control the masses. These people don't have the attention spans necessary to coherently advocate for their deluded worldviews.

I can't speak for everyone, but I've been following this before it had a name and was confined to Hubei province in China. This was even before China built the massive hospital in Wuhan within 10 days. At the time, I never believed it would've hit here, at least at that rate. This virus made me nervous when it was still in China. By the time it hit Europe though, we should've started travel bans. Italy and Spain were disasters in March of last year.

President Biden is right to restrict travel, but it shouldn't wait that long. If it's an emergency, close it down immediately.