Originally Posted by
Granite64
No one knows because the CCP kept it quiet
See right there, you put blame where it's due.
Originally Posted by
Granite64
Everyone gets mad at Trump for calling it the Chinese virus, but the man is right.
...and right there, you did not. That somehow implies that an entire country, or ethnic group, was responsible for covering up the existence of the virus in the first few weeks, and it was not. It was a single political party, NOT any of the above things.
Originally Posted by
anacapamalibu
Takes less than an hour to shutdown all air travel. It is possible to "hermetically seal" a country's borders in short order.
8:46:40: Flight 11 crashes into the north face of the North Tower (1 WTC) of the World Trade Center, between floors 93 and 99. The aircraft enters the tower intact.
9:42: Senior FAA traffic manager Ben Sliney issues the execution order for SCATANA grounding all air traffic over the United States and diverting any incoming international traffic to alternate destinations.
Ground borders are a bit more of a problem, because you can't just tell ATC to not allow pilots to land.
But sealing borders does absolutely nothing if you miss even one case. You're still on the wrong side of exponential growth if you don't follow it up with aggressive testing and isolation/quarantine requirements for people who test positive or come into contact with people who test positive. And despite China talking out of both sides of its mouth (complaining about other countries banning people from China while simultaneously restricting travel within its borders), its ACTIONS show that they're taking this virus seriously, and they still have mandatory quarantine requirements on entry for individuals returning from abroad. The US on the other hand, did this half assed job where they stopped travel from China, except they didn't really because US citizens and LPRs could still enter, and they didn't really have strict quarantine requirements either, AND they never really tested aggressively. Which makes sealing the border pointless, if you're not going to do anything useful with the time you buy from doing it.