US To Require COVID Tests For Travelers Coming From China (politico.com) 85
The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will require anyone arriving by air from China to provide a negative Covid test, following a surge of Covid-19 cases across China as Beijing has eased its strict zero-Covid rules. Politico reports: Under the new rules, which will take effect on Jan. 5, anyone two years and older will need to show a negative result from a test taken within two days of their departure from airports in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, administration officials told reporters in a briefing. The move reflects the Biden administration's alarm about the potential spillover of new Covid variants linked to soaring Covid infections in China. The Chinese government ended its draconian Covid-zero policy -- hinged to mass testing, tracing and lockdowns -- on Dec. 7 following mass protests in November fueled by anger about the strategy. According to health authorities in Milan, almost half of the passengers on flights from China were found to have COVID-19. They, too, will begin testing all arrivals from China and will be sequencing the tests to see if there are new variants.
It's something (Score:2)
"We must do something!"
"This is something..."
"We must do it!"
It's not gonna help, but you did something.
Re:It's something (Score:4, Interesting)
It could help. As long as no exceptions allowed for Americans who visited China, which was a hole in the Trump admin's policy. It's still not great though, going from "draconian" policy to "no" policy in China is just weird.
They really need to ramp up their vaccination program fast sinceit looks like they're getting similar spikes in severe illness and death similar to the early days in US and EU. And just like some in the US wanted to do, they're fudging numbers so that any co-morbidity doesn't count in their stats, as well as clamping down on hospitals showing "unexplained-but-not-covid" rise in deaths. Sweep it under the rug, nothing to see here. They need their own Fauci who's willing to tell their dictator that he's wrong.
Re: It's something (Score:1)
Re: It's something (Score:1)
Why January 5th? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to see that Covid appears to be completely unimportant now.
Otherwise why would you wait until January 5th, which is after the current wave in China has peaked and is on the decline?
Waiting until Jan 5th lets in tens, probably hundreds of thousands of visitors with Covid into the U,S.
If Covid actually mattered you'd be doing rapid tests for every visitor who originated in China, starting today, and if you couldn't start today blocking or holding all visitors from China until you could start.
But, as noted, Covid is obviously unimportant to the government, so they are instead opting for a PR move of laxly requiring testing after it's way too late to matter.
Re:Why January 5th? (Score:5, Insightful)
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China's travel ban is for Chinese nationals. There are people travelling right now already.
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China doesn't lift their travel ban till Jan 8 so no one will be coming prior to that. regardless The US is a rats nest of Covid anyway.
Also it takes time for departments to prepare for this kind of thing. You can't just shout "Huzzah, it is done" and expect it to automagically happen at 400+ airports across 2 countries. I'd be surprised if this can be put in place by the 5th of Jan.
Re:Why January 5th? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee, I wonder how many COVID cases have poured over an open fucking border for the last year.
You mean the border with Canada, right?
Right wingers love to call the U.S. southern border open, as though the government isn't doing anything to control the borders. But that's a load of crap. If it were true, Texas wouldn't be freaking out about all the people that they're forcing to stay in Mexico while they await decisions on their entry permission; clearly, if that border were actually porous, all those people would have found a way to just pour over that open border and would be here in the U.S. already instead of waiting to immigrate.
When is the Republican Party going to admit that their border policies are really about keeping non-whites out, and not about security or health or safety at all? After all, if their policies were about anything else, there would be a call to build a wall on the Canadian border, much of which doesn't even have so much as a foot-tall barbed-wire fence. And yet even that border is pretty solidly controlled. Don't believe me? Try to cross it illegally, and we'll eagerly await your reply after you get out of jail (assuming this story is still open for posting). Not so sure, eh?
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Re:Why January 5th? (Score:4, Insightful)
US Customs and Border Protection identified 2.4 million 'encounters' in FY22. 2.4 million they CAUGHT.
Most people don't try to cross and then give up; they keep trying over and over. So those 2.4 million encounters probably involved on the order of 100K actual people trying dozens of times.
Also, knowing how many people tried to get through and failed tells us nothing about how many people succeeded. That number could just as easily be anywhere from zero to several billion. But the lack of huge growth in the number of undocumented people in the U.S. suggests that it is relatively small.
Are you claiming US borders aren't as porous as a screen door?
Yes.
Based on what, actually?
Based on the fact that there were on the order of 2.6 million thwarted attempts to cross the southern border this year, and the estimated increase in the number of undocumented immigrants in that time period is far smaller than that number, and the vast majority of those were people who overstayed their visas, not people who crossed the border illegally.
Re: Why January 5th? (Score:2)
Re:Why January 5th? (Score:4, Interesting)
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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The point of this policy isn't public health. The point is to prop up the profits of test manufacturers.
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Lol, the point of propping up profits isn't to protect the wages of the people in the factory. Its to enrich executives and shareholders, especially the shareholders who can legally buy stock with prior knowledge that a program like this is in the works before it is officially announced to the general public.
Re:Why January 5th? (Score:4, Insightful)
China still has a ravel ban until Jan 8. They announce the lifting of the ban, and the US announces the beginning of testing before the ban ends. This is normal stuff, and both countries are trying to allow everyone involved time to adjust so that they are ready for this.
Read the summary again, try all the way to end!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Did you realize people are coming in from China today or nah?
That's only for Chinese nationals.
Did you miss the part of the SUMMARY where it said:
According to health authorities in Milan, almost half of the passengers on flights from China were found to have COVID-19.
How are the people in Milan finding that if flights are not coming in from China with people on them?
It doesn't matter if they are Chinese citizens, what matters is if people are coming from a known very hot spot for Covid. That's the whole re
Re: Why January 5th? (Score:1)
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Trump was right to do this when he did, and acted as fast as was reasonable at the time since we had little concrete information.
Now we know all about Covid and the ban hammer should have come down instantly, not a week or two later...
So I'm very much criticizing the current administration and not Trump at all...
why? (Score:1)
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There isn't anything you, or anyone else, can do to prevent variants. Although if you were really anti-variant, you'd be anti-clot-shot.
What do the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have to do with anything? Oh, you're one of those people who doesn't realize that unexpected clotting was associated with only two specific vaccines, only one of which was ever given in the U.S. outside of clinical trials, and only in relatively small numbers. (Well, it probably is associated with the other vector vaccine, Sputnik V, but good luck getting Russia to admit that [nejm.org].)
Bio101; what happens when a non-sterilizing negative reproductive pressure is applied to any given population?
You're begging the question, starting with the conclusion you hope to r
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Wow, what a load of horseshit.
Citation needed. Everything I said there is well established.
Of course evolution would prompt new mutations.
Based on what evidence? Viruses are not alive. They do not respond to stress through epigenetic changes or gene transfer. All mutations in viruses are caused by copying errors, which is largely unaffected by whether someone is vaccinated or not, beyond that someone who is vaccinated gets fewer copies, and thus fewer opportunities for errors to be introduced. That is pretty much incontrovertible.
Evolution will cause *different* mutations by el
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Re: Wait, I thought this was xenophobic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Haha now that this is no longer an outrage weapon to use as a cudgel against Trump all outrage has expired.
Re:Wait, I thought this was xenophobic? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Trump policy was to allow in Americans who had visited or resided in China. Apparently they thought only native Chinese citizens could get covid.
Yes vaccines are fine, but we still have a large number of anti-vaxxers and covid deniers, and just maybe we want to protect them too.
Apparently the number of positive tests from Chinese travellers is high, a flight to Milan showed a 52% positive test rate, which if true means it's not just a few manageable cases slipping through the net. Possibly those testing positive are more anxious to escape China before a zero tolerance gets re-instated?
Re:Wait, I thought this was xenophobic? (Score:4, Informative)
Or was that only when Trump did it?
Trump neither did nor proposed doing this. Trump proposed restrictions based on nationality, not based on where a flight was coming from. That was xenophobic. There were calls all around to put equal requirements on Chinese as for US Nationals coming from China but Trump didn't want any of that.
Biden's administration's policies don't give a fuck who you are or what you look like.
What about the vaccines? If they're effective, at all, why do we care about what comes from China?
Do you understand the concept of variants? And how they relate to vaccines?
I have a better question: What do we call someone who asks such stupid questions? Is idiot still the appropriate word?
Re:Wait, I thought this was xenophobic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dumbass. Tell me, if you're so much on Team Biden; when have test restrictions EVER resulted in reduced case counts?
They have always resulted in reduced case counts. They don't eliminate cases, because some people can be contagious before they test positive. They do reduce cases, though, because a lot of people test positive before they are symptomatic, and without testing, 100% of those folks would otherwise have gotten on an airplane or attended a social event or whatever; even if you only catch 30% of them, that's still a 30% reduction in transmission.
Hint: The answer is never. You can't control the spread of a respiratory virus, you stupid panicky animal. Nowhere in the world, over the past 3 years, have we seen *any* success in reducing the spread, particularly not using testing methods.
Citation needed.
Counter-citations:
Maybe you should get your medical opinions from actual research papers written by epidemiologists in the field instead of from people with MBAs on Fox News. Both groups have equally strong opinions, but only the first have actual understanding of the science and actual credibility in presenting it.
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They have always resulted in reduced case counts. They don't eliminate cases, because some people can be contagious before they test positive. They do reduce cases, though, because a lot of people test positive before they are symptomatic, and without testing, 100% of those folks would otherwise have gotten on an airplane or attended a social event or whatever; even if you only catch 30% of them, that's still a 30% reduction in transmission.
You can certainly take measures to reduce transmission as your references demonstrate yet in the end all you are doing is slightly delaying the onset of infection. The number of cases does not change only their temporal distribution.
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They have always resulted in reduced case counts. They don't eliminate cases, because some people can be contagious before they test positive. They do reduce cases, though, because a lot of people test positive before they are symptomatic, and without testing, 100% of those folks would otherwise have gotten on an airplane or attended a social event or whatever; even if you only catch 30% of them, that's still a 30% reduction in transmission.
You can certainly take measures to reduce transmission as your references demonstrate yet in the end all you are doing is slightly delaying the onset of infection. The number of cases does not change only their temporal distribution.
That's not really true except when you're talking about diseases that confer lifetime immunity after infection.
Omicron produces only very short-term immunity against subsequent reinfection — on the order of low-double-digit weeks. There are some people who are exposed often enough to get reinfected every 90 days or so. If you have, let's say, a million people in that group (this is just an arbitrary number for demonstration purposes) and a mitigation strategy delays their next case by just one week,
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That's not really true except when you're talking about diseases that confer lifetime immunity after infection.
SARS2 infections are quite likely to confer long lived immunity similar to that observed for SARS albeit not of the sterilizing sort.
Omicron produces only very short-term immunity against subsequent reinfection â" on the order of low-double-digit weeks. There are some people who are exposed often enough to get reinfected every 90 days or so. If you have, let's say, a million people in that group (this is just an arbitrary number for demonstration purposes) and a mitigation strategy delays their next case by just one week, you've reduced the total all-time cases by about 78,000.
Severity of post infection infections are not in the same universe as infections without previously acquired immunity. To become a case a SARS2 infection has to be diagnosed. More people having no or slight symptoms upon reinfection translates into fewer cases as fewer people bother seeking a diagnosis. Immunity is maintained with repeated exposure yielding decreasing cases
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That's not really true except when you're talking about diseases that confer lifetime immunity after infection.
SARS2 infections are quite likely to confer long lived immunity similar to that observed for SARS albeit not of the sterilizing sort.
Right, but sterilizing immunity (immunity against infection) is the only thing that really matters when you're talking about the number of cases.
Omicron produces only very short-term immunity against subsequent reinfection â" on the order of low-double-digit weeks. There are some people who are exposed often enough to get reinfected every 90 days or so. If you have, let's say, a million people in that group (this is just an arbitrary number for demonstration purposes) and a mitigation strategy delays their next case by just one week, you've reduced the total all-time cases by about 78,000.
Severity of post infection infections are not in the same universe as infections without previously acquired immunity.
None of which is relevant to the claim that delaying a case doesn't reduce the total number of cases.
To become a case a SARS2 infection has to be diagnosed. More people having no or slight symptoms upon reinfection translates into fewer cases as fewer people bother seeking a diagnosis. Immunity is maintained with repeated exposure yielding decreasing cases.
Most people have no or slight symptoms on their first infection with omicron, too. Reinfection versus first infection doesn't meaningfully change that equation. Either way, all you're doing is increasing the denominator by ignoring all of the unreported cases, not
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Right, but sterilizing immunity (immunity against infection) is the only thing that really matters when you're talking about the number of cases.
"Case" has a specific meaning. If you are not diagnosed with a disease there is no case. A "case" does not automatically arise in the event of infection or illness.
None of which is relevant to the claim that delaying a case doesn't reduce the total number of cases.
It absolutely is relevant in that it leads less people to bother seeking diagnosis.
You're grossly misrepresenting the claims in that paper. What it says is that when you stop doing non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), you will probably get a surge.
A surge with lots of people getting sick /w RSV at once seems to me to clearly be detrimental to individuals and society as it places unnecessary avoidable strain on medical systems.
As for the total number of cases WRT covid and delay between infection I don't ha
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Look for simple datasets, draw your own conclusions instead of bring force fed what some "scientist" is being paid to feed you.
Proper analysis of epidemiological data requires enormous effort to weed out confounding variables, correct for data biasing, etc. Grabbing a simple data set and doing analysis yourself without a very, very deep understanding of epidemiology is, to be frank, a surefire way to come up with conclusions that, as H. L. Mencken would say, are simple, obvious, and wrong. The subject is legitimately hard, and reasoning about the data doubly so.
I've read through a bunch of shoddy papers written by right-wing auth
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...whereas the majority of scientists in academia don't benefit financially at all from whether a particular strategy works or not...
jfc.
I'm just going to start laughing now, but please continue on with your ignorant bullshit.
They don't. They benefit from publishing papers. The only exceptions are the professors themselves, *some* of whom benefit in an *indirect* way from their labs getting funding from drug companies. But none of the students get a penny from drug companies, and they make up the vast majority of paper authors. And the odds of the relatively small number of companies that manufacture COVID tests having any association with the specific research institutions doing research in that area are not particularly hi
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Instead, we ( in the US ) shutdown gyms and playgrounds, sent people home. But we kept the liquor stores open!
Most people don't exercise in liquor stores. Breathing deeply results in higher rates of spread and more severe cases.
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Trump proposed nationality-based restrictions because US courts have held that citizens, permanent residents, and even their immediate family members have a right of return to the US.
See, for example, item 3 here [lawfareblog.com], or dicta from this Supreme Court case [justia.com]:
Congress is well within its authority in refusing, absent proof of at least the opportunity for the development of a relationship between citizen parent and child, to commit this country to embracing a child as a citizen entitled as of birth to the full protection of the United States, to the absolute right to enter its borders, and to full participation in the political process.
That dicta implies that citizenship carries that "absolute right to enter its borders". Trump's different treatment of US nationals and permanent residents was legally required, not xenophobic.
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Trump proposed nationality-based restrictions because US courts have held that citizens, permanent residents, and even their immediate family members have a right of return to the US.
The US courts say nothing about the right to enter the country without quarantine; quarantine is what people were calling for, not a total entry ban.
Stop excusing the shitty orange racist's shitty policies.
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Are those supposed demands for quarantine why https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com] mentions mandatory quarantine (for returning Americans) as a concern for travelers? Or https://apnews.com/article/asi... [apnews.com] explicitly counts returning Americans as meaning that the travel ban wasn't one?
Stop trying to rewrite history.
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Do you understand the concept of variants? And how they relate to vaccines?
You don't seem to. Vaccines prevent hospitalization and death providing a robust polyclonal response across all known variants.
What they don't do is meaningfully keep people from becoming infected.
https://assets.publishing.serv... [service.gov.uk]
I have a better question: What do we call someone who asks such stupid questions? Is idiot still the appropriate word?
Annoying is what I would call someone who is often wrong and yet still seems fit to sit in judgement of the intellect of others.
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Vaccines prevent hospitalization and death providing a robust polyclonal response across all known variants.
No they don't. The efficacy of vaccines varies greatly based on genetic makeup of the virus. Heck we even have omicron specific vaccines now. Pay attention.
And that's before we do something like, take into account the context of what I wrote, which is in the context of *unknown* variants. Don't read sentences out of context, it's not a way to look intelligent...
Annoying is what I would call someone who is often wrong and yet still seems fit to sit in judgement of the intellect of others.
... it's a way to look annoying.
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Or was that only when Trump did it?
Trump neither did nor proposed doing this. Trump proposed restrictions based on nationality, not based on where a flight was coming from. That was xenophobic. There were calls all around to put equal requirements on Chinese as for US Nationals coming from China but Trump didn't want any of that.
Biden's administration's policies don't give a fuck who you are or what you look like.
What about the vaccines? If they're effective, at all, why do we care about what comes from China?
Do you understand the concept of variants? And how they relate to vaccines?
I have a better question: What do we call someone who asks such stupid questions? Is idiot still the appropriate word?
Idiot is the appropriate word.
Most Chinese are inoculated with Sinovax, a native Chinese vaccination which has been demonstrated to be less effective than either of the 3 western vaccines (AstraZeneca, Moderna or Pfizer) which has been a key contributor in the rise of cases in China.
Also regarding the "blerg but Trump" vomit, when Trump instituted his ban COVID was already a major issue in Italy and beginning to become a major issue in the UK. There were already domestic cases in the US too. As you me
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Re:Wait, I thought this was xenophobic? (Score:4, Informative)
This appears to simply be anyone traveling from China, regardless of nationality.
Vaccines are effective. Doesn't mean I want to get sick and feel run down for a couple days.
Let us hope ... (Score:2)
Let us hope that it is only low vaccination rate, low homegrown vaccine efficacy, and lack of infection immunity [slashdot.org] that are the reasons for the current surge in China.
The last thing we need is yet another Delta-like variant that stresses hospitals more (along with the flu and RSV) and causes another round of high number of deaths ...
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The last 3 years we've had more deaths than would normally expect. I would assume at some point as Covid fades and less and less die from it we might expect to see less deaths than expected. Wondering if we'll ever get to that point and if so when
A portion of excess death figures are pathological. Related studies are often calculated retaliative to pre-pandemic year averages that fail to capture trends such as aging population and generally deteriorating health of younger populations.
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Let us hope that it is only low vaccination rate, low homegrown vaccine efficacy, and lack of infection immunity [slashdot.org] that are the reasons for the current surge in China.
I've yet to see evidence that the spike in infections is because of any of those things. If their previous lockdown policy did work, then this is simply the combinations of Delta and Omicron spikes we saw elsewhere in the world.
Assuming their health care system no better than the US, then we should expect to see 430 million cases and 4.6 million dead within a month or two.
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Who cares? (Score:2)
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or have already had it
You should realize that natural immunity doesn't count.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27... [npr.org]
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Who cares? (Score:1)
...but did you die?
Stop all travel to/from China (Score:1)
I doubt these tests are entirely accurate. Covid morphs all the time. Also, an infected person may not test positive if that person has only been infected for a short time.
Far too many variables. Safest thing to do is to ban all travel to/from China. Except for, maybe, a few extraordinary cases, and that should take a very special approval process.