Originally Posted by HK_Katherine:
So you read the article from the Guardian about "travel during Covid" and noted the total lack of people being interacted with at Heathrow. I assume this person wore a mask on the plane, since they are a HK resident and HK residents all wear masks - masks being pretty good at preventing outbound infection. You are all fine with asymptomatic carriers travelling because they "don't know" they have it, yet they infect more other people. There is ZERO rational common sense in any of this.
There is honestly no common sense AT ALL in banning travel. The WHO had it right in the first place when they said shutting down travel was not advised. Some level of sensible social distancing; mask wearing; stopping large group gatherings is appropriate. Other than that, we should just get back to living and open up the borders. Rich countries should be helping poor countries with PPE and bolstering their health systems so that no country has a breakdown of their systems, but other than that, this is just something that has to move through the community and be managed. Blocking it is NOT the solution. It never was. Some temporary measures to get it under control - fine. Some ongoing measures to prevent overwhelming numbers are sensible.
But travel is 10% of global GDP; we live in a world where many families are spread across the globe; where businesses operate globally. Destroying ALL of this for a virus with such a low death rate is pathetic. It's a gross failure of public policy and it's a worse failure of humans to evaluate and manage their own risk appetite.
History is not going to give this response a good score card.