Update International Travel Ban List Now

Many countries that have been locked down for over a month are now seeing some stabilization and are trying to reopen.  To improve their chances to reopen successfully, they have all ramped up their testing and tracking capabilities and continue to restrict foreign travel.  While the efficacy of International travel bans are debatable, most scientists believe that for countries to successfully manage a domestic test and contact tracing program, it would help to restrict travel from global hotspots to minimize reinfections.  Once a country has established a comprehensive domestic tracking program and controlled community spread, then they could allocate more resources to testing and contact tracing all foreign travelers. 

The current CDC list of restricted countries was last updated on March 14th,  nearly 10 weeks ago, and urgently needs to be updated to include many new hotspots.  Just today, Russia and Brazil overtook many of the European countries that had been suffering as number 2 and number 3 on the list of most infected countries.  Not only do they have a high number of infections and infections per capita but most importantly they have exponentially growing infections with effective reproduction numbers, R >1, and worrisome doubling times.  That means that a high and rapidly growing number of their citizens are getting infected every day.  Countries like Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and Germany can probably go off the list since their R values have fallen significantly below 1 and their newly confirmed cases have been declining for several weeks.  Removing these countries, however, is not as important as adding the highly infected countries to the CDC list that is used to screen hospital patients, air travelers, and other sensitive venues.  An outdated list makes the USA highly vulnerable to reinfection.  This is especially important as the USA reopens tourist spots like Disney World that are travel magnets for South Americans from Brazil, Chile, and Peru who are entering into their high season for flu infections.  Moreover this travel list should be updated based primarily on public health rather than political or economic concerns.  Let's not repeat the same error we made in February when we were so focused on China that we failed to recognize the hotspots developing in Europe and let infected Europeans into the USA.  

Country
Infections
Infections
Deaths
Deaths
     R
Doubling
Fatality

/million

/million

time(days)
Rate
USA
1,591,991
        4,821
 94,994
        288
     1.06
50
6.0%
Russia
   308,705
        2,116
    2,972
          20
     1.06
30
1.0%
Brazil
   293,357
        1,382
 18,859
          89
     1.26
11
6.4%
India
   112,028
             81
    3,434
            2
     1.20
14
3.1%
Peru
   104,020
        3,160
    3,024
          92
     1.20
15
2.9%
Chile
      53,617
        2,808
       544
          28
     1.27
11
1.0%
Mexico
      54,346
           422
    5,666
          44
     1.21
14
10.4%
Pakistan
      45,898
           208
       985
            4
     1.19
15
2.1%
Bangladesh
      26,738
           163
       386
            2
     1.25
11
1.4%
Indonesia
      19,189
             70
    1,242
            5
     1.20
16
6.5%

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-19 Infection and Mortality Rates as a Function of Age and Gender

Image
With over 2.4 million COVID-19 cases and over 160,000 deaths globally, there is a lot of data that can be analyzed to better understand this virus as a function of age, co-morbidities, medical history (such as prior exposure to coronaviruses like SARS, and other vaccines like BCG), etc.   The two important factors that have been noted since the early days of this pandemic are age and gender and they continue to be the most important factors.   We look at the age and gender dependencies with the best single data set provided by the Spanish Health Department containing over 200,000 cases (or 0.4% of the total population) and over 20,000 deaths.   Spain has tested over 2.0% of its population which while short of a comprehensive sample does begin to give us some ideas about how the disease has affected the entire country.   We look at the probability of a random person acquiring the disease as a function of age.   We know that this sample is not truly random no...
Read more

COVID-19 is now officially a Pandemic

The WHO after many weeks of dithering has finally declared COVID-19 a pandemic.   Most scientists and healthcare professionals already had been treating it as such anyway.   Scientific advisers to Chancellor Merkel warned her that as many as 2/3 of all Germans may contract the coronavirus and she needed to attack it seriously and immediately as a major pandemic.   The US, as many had urged for weeks, is finally ramping up testing and found 313 new cases today – more than the cumulative total for weeks up to March 5 th .   The stock market took another major tumble today with the Dow now down more than 20% - forecasting a recession is coming to the US.   (These forecasts are sometimes scoffed at since the Dow has forecast 9 of the past 5 recessions.)   Is the world ending?   Is there any good news? I think the risks are many and they are far more likely than optimistic scenarios painted by Trump, but there are some signs that the world may av...
Read more

Pre-Thanksgiving Dip in COVID-19 Cases

Image
COVID-19 cases in the USA have shown a sharp decrease over the last 8 days causing the 7-day rolling average to peak and rollover (see figure below – red squares).   The question is whether this is measuring a real lasting phenomenon – perhaps attributable to local COVID-19 fires burning out, or to mitigation factors taking hold, or to some temporary factor associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.   The answer is probably a combination of all three that will ultimately be overwhelmed by an increase in Thanksgiving transmission. Some COVID-19 outbreaks have burned so strongly and for so long (3-4 months) that local “herd immunity” may be acting as a retardant to the fire.   For example, in North Dakota (ND) 10.3% of the population has now been confirmed infected (see table below).   State Confirmed Testing Est. Pop Deaths Death per Fatality   Infection % Positive % ...
Read more