Conservatives are still crowing about the China travel ban. Well? Did it work?

What about the Italian and Korean travel bans? Those were just as or more important.

And just as ineffective.

In addition to all the whining about “open borders.” Actually the virus traveled in the opposite direction, from the U.S. to Mexico.

These travel bans may have been sensible only to slow it down a bit, to buy time for a real response, but we didn’t get that together, either.

In the end, the bans turned out to be exactly what we thought they were from the beginning: performative xenophobia for Trump’s base.

I'd have been OK with shutting down the borders all together as soon as possible to slow it down. In a pandemic that's the time to do it.

In other words, mysophobia (or germophobia) is still acceptable in this day and age while xenophobia is not.

Sure. When warranted. Your chances of being killed by COVID-19 is probably better than by an illegal immigrant. More American jobs have been lost due to COIVD than illegals.

Most cases came from Europe. So why did it take so long to stop the airlines from dumping in 100's or 1000's of travelers A DAY from there? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html

Imagine how many people came from there into the 3 NYC area International airports alone?