I do “get it” in that these cruise ships must be the closest thing to “petri dishes” for the time being.
But aside from that, why is there such a stigma around people who have flown or otherwise traveled (maybe by train?) during the pandemic? Is “traveling” any different than going outside your own home to go grocery shopping?
I “get it” that staying quarantined inside your own home seems to be the way to go, but I’m trying to understand the difference between:
Person A) flies from Point A to Point B on Monday, returns on Thursday, takes every precaution and maybe comes within 6-feet “social distance” of 40 people during her trip.
**Person B) **spends Monday through Thursday quarantined at home, with the exception of a grocery-store run where she comes also within 6-feet “social distance” of 40 people throughout her grocery trip.
If both people ultimately test positive for Covid-19, then we all know how this is gonna go.
Person A is gonna have to deal with a world of shit, because “you traveled you bitch, how could you!!”, and Person B is gonna get sympathy because she’s just living her life, doing what she needs to do.
So why the Scarlet Letter T these days (for “traveler”)?
I guess TL/DR version (with made up numbers) - if I live in Dallas where the infection rate is what? 1:1000? Suppose Denver has an identical infection rate of 1:1000.
Why am I forgivable if I go outdoors in Dallas, but I’m an asshole if I fly there and back to Denver (where the infection rate is identical)? Is it because of my time in the airport? My time on the plane? Why am I considered inherently more infectious just because I recently traveled?
It’s a question of necessity. You need to go to the grocery store - you don’t need to travel to Dallas.
Furthermore - your person A, who came in contact with 40 people on their unnecessary trip to Dallas, still has to go to grocery store upon returning! Where they will have contact with another 40 people.
That said, I do think there is a certain subset of the population that just loves to tell others what to do, and they’ve having a fucking field day with the coronavirus. Just remember that these were the same people telling you “Don’t buy masks, they don’t work.”
If you happen to be an asymptomatic carrier, at the grocery store you may (in spite of all precautions) spread the disease to someone else - someone else from your local area, who would also be encountering local people that you also encounter. Your local spreading of the disease isn’t great news, but it still keeps the disease in the community.
On a trip to Dallas (if you live in Chicago, say), if you are an asymptomatic carrier, you may expose people who will carry to disease to fresh locations that have not had the disease before. This is worse than local spread among a closed community.
TLDR: Try not to spread the disease around your community. Really try not to spread the disease to new communities.
Unless you’re an airline pilot like my niece, who is now stranded in NYC because her deadhead flight was canceled for the return leg. Not only stranded, but there is no room service, so she has to go out for food.
Every person who travels is another vector for transmitting the virus to a new community. Without the travel the disease is spreading in communities with overlapping means of transmission, which is self-limiting. But taking a potentially asymptomatic carrier to a region without the disease, or bringing back the virus to a region that doesn’t yet have it is how we got into a worldwide pandemic so quickly.
It’s the “six degrees of [Kevin Bacon/Paul Erdos/Jeff Dean]” small worlds effect. Plane travellers are the highly connected nodes which greatly reduce the total diameter of the graph.
The 40 people interacted with in the local grocery store likely live in the same area and have relatively high chance of contacting each other anyway so if the grocery shopper caught COVID from one of them and passed to another, it is fairly likely that that transmission would have happened through other contact anyway, so she would have not increased the risk of transmission between those two people much.
The 40 people interacted with on the plane likely do not live in the same area, and if the traveller had not acted as a vector between two of them, they probability of transmission would have been very low. So the traveller increased the risk of transmission by quite a lot.
No plane travel made sense, in the early days of the spread. But where could you possibly be flying to now that would be a “new community”? It’s everywhere.
Travel at this time is a equalization of infection to the worst area infection rates, it only works against us, there is no benefit. It increases the risk of spreading the virus from a more concentrated area to a less concentrated area. It does not reduce any infection. It’s a lose lose.
There were posters during WWII in England and the US asking “Is Your Trip/Journey Really Necessary?”. The idea was/is that we’re all in this together and by taking the appropriate cautions together we have a better chance of making it through.
Because of the amount of time you spend there, and the way the air circulates, isn’t it a lot more likely that you’ll catch the virus from someone you’re on the same airplane with (even if you’re never within 6 feet of them physically) than from someone you’re in the same grocery store with?
And what is Person A doing at Point B between Monday and Thursday? Is she sheltering in place? If not, shame on her; and if so, why travel in the first place?
Unfortunately that is probably true, and at this point, restrictions on flying might actually inhibit people from getting aid where it is needed. But unnecessary travel should still be curtailed as much as possible because airports and particularly TSA security checkpoints–which are cesspits of contagion at the best of times–are chokepoints for a virus that is almost certainly aerosolized. There is also the issue that a second epidemic could occur right on top of his one, like the virulent influenza epidemic that epidemiologists were actually afraid was coming, and having a second, even more deadly pandemic on top of this one could do far worse than kill ~1% of infected populations and severely damage the world economy. A viral epidemic with a 20% case fatality rate could result in civil breakdowns, so doing everything possible to discourage travel and transmission is still the smart move even if its effect on the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic is too little, too late.
You know, this seems like such an obvious, fundamental statement that it is barely worth making. And yet, people just don’t fucking get it. If everyone would just state at home for a few weeks except for performing critical functions and occupations, we could get a solid handle on the outbreak and minimize the number of avoidable deaths. And yet, there are motherfuckers right below my window whooping and hollering (and occasionally coughing violently…not kidding) in a big group while waiting for their takeout. I had a bunch of kids skateboarding back and forth on the sidewalk this morning, and a group of about twenty bicyclists out for a ride who decided to stop and get coffee even though the coffee shop has clear signage saying “ONLY 5 PEOPLE IN THE STORE AT A TIME, PLEASE!” I’m about to go George Carlin on these fuckheads but it wouldn’t make an impression anyway.
Viruses are just not all that good at determining how important your trip is, or how important a person you are. They have no sense of loyalty, or adventure, or even any evil desire to infect. They float, land, and mostly die. But they only mostly die. On their own, viruses can’t travel far enough to have an epidemic. But humans are handy for covering vast distances, where lots of uninfected people are. Most humans don’t travel more than about 40 miles from “home.” Some move thousands of miles multiple times a year. That’s party time for a virus.
Let’s say you happen to live in an apartment building where no one has yet been infected, despite your town having a decent number of cases.
Your next-door-neighborhood decides he must fly to NYC and visit family right this minute. He gets infected and comes back to your apartment building. Coughing like a motherfucker.
Your odds of getting infected were relatively low before he went traveling. They could have stayed low if he had not traveled. But now they are high. And it won’t take long for your building to now be the newest hot spot. All because someone decided the virus was already “everywhere”, so why not visit Aunt Mabel and them.
All of the statistical indicators we have are trailing indicators.
The number of people with symptoms trails the number of people infected.
Death trails ventilation trails hospitalization trails symptoms.
The numbers you are looking at today, trail the actions that were done 1 week, 2 weeks and 1 month ago.
And 1 month ago, restrictions on travel would have made a dramatic difference on the spread of infection. Vast areas of the world and of the USA would now be infection free if restrictions on travel had been enforced.
So 2 things:
People are now doing what they should have done a month ago, because they are looking at figures reflecting what happened a month ago. That’s the political.
And what people do now will still be showing a month from now. States have no idea what their real status is, or how effective any measures will be. That’s the desperate.
Worst case, if there are no controls, in a year you’ll all be dead.
Worst case, if unnecessary controls destroy the economy, you’ll all be broke.
People are weighing up those two worst-case scenarios, and going with the political and desperate, because the worst case for political and desperate is far, far less bad than the worst case for everybody dead.
In my county, since we are so isolated (almost an island), if no one ever came here, we wouldn’t have any infections, or at least they would be greatly minimized due to a lack of exposure to the outside world.
So far, we have 2 confirmed infections. In both cases, they are people who traveled in the last few days; one out of county; the other, out of state.