toomanybooks

https://wgntv.com/news/coronavirus/p...cbJ9j4GCRvTifU

MSPeconomist

This reminds me of the six hours lines for foreigners at ORD around September 1st when there was a CBP computer meltdown just when all the new foreign students were arriving. GE folks zipped through by stepping over all of the people sitting and sleeping in line in the hallways. Other USA citizens had waits of an hour or two.

It's a good thing that the deadlines for USA entry by Schengen and UK people are stated in terms of the flight's departure time and not time of completion of CBP immigration processing.

SamirD

That's nuts. I thought the 2hr domestic security lines I've seen at T3 were bad.

Randomness

Insider is reporting crowds at ORD, DFW, and IAD:

https://www.insider.com/crowds-trave...vel-ban-2020-3

username

Gee. All that crowd increases infection risk!

SamirD

After seeing the utter ridiculousness which with this crisis has been managed, by both the citizens and the leaders, I realize that the United States is no more. It's no longer the same US that it was once, and I doubt it will ever be again.

Throughout history, national crisis have always brought the best of everything to the top--from Pearl Harbor to the Great Depression to 9-11--and now this joke of mess management is the best there is? We're all dead with mass stupidity like this, and China will be buying the whole country behind closed doors shortly after it needs 'bailout' money. I'm completely ashamed to be an American right now as we're a joke compared to other nations ability. We are literally that dumb kid in school that is too big to mess with, but that everyone knows is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Randomness

Yeah, that's mentioned in the article.

GUWonder

So much for the advise to enable and encourage social distancing.

Causing crowds like this helps the spread of the virus.

DHS should be revising its practices to stop the spread of the virus. That would include CBP not fostering the conditions for such crowding at airports and TSA giving up the ID and boarding pass checks for domestic flights at US airports.

DHS should have taken action to make sure that conditions for more virus spread wouldn’t happen at airports as a result of DHS actions and that they don’t make the homeland less secure from the virus, but it’s apparent that they didn’t manage this well.

ezefllying

What should be happening is that arriving flights should each be given a disembarkation “slot” based on actual arrival time. Then, only one international flight should be allowed to disembark at a time. Once 80-90 percent of that flight’s passengers clear customs, let the next flight deplane.

There won’t be much more delay, if any, via that process, and you’ll dramatically reduce crowding in the terminal. I’d much rather sit in a HEPA-filtered aircraft than a jam-packed arrivals hall right now.

I don’t think this is rocket science.

username

Just look at how many Global Entry machines are INOP at various airports, what do you expect?

On top of that, maybe they view this as a temporary thing and did not put much thought into it? I mean, in a few days, this is not going to be a problem.

ezefllying

It’s not often that a government has the “fortune” of having trial-run a travel ban a couple years earlier. You’d think they could have worked out the kinks this time around.

(Not that anyone in charge in 2017, at the cabinet level, is still there. Institutional memory is pretty low at the SES level right now.)

That Liberty Bond parade in Philadelphia was a one-day event and it wrecked havoc on the city 102 years ago. This looks like one of those apocalyptic scenes out of Wuhan in late January.

Mama

I thought it was not wise to announce the border closure well in advance. Now they created more problems. They should have shut down the entry from schengen countries immediately two days ago.

zoomgirl

Sounds like there are delays at other airports as well. I’m in on a layover in Frankfurt, about to head to IAD. Assuming that a 4 hour layover is treated as “being in Europe,” I am not holding out much hope for my global entry doing any good in this situation.

username

That would create a different set of problem.

tom tulpe

Unless you're a U.S. citizen or Green Card holder, I don't think they're going to let you on that plane.