I think it’s meant to discourage shopping or eating at rest stops or small towns along the way, or unnecessary contact between family & friends either at a destination or while in a car or minivan, travelling. They are in fact trying to discourage “any other movement” with the closing of gatherings over 10-50 people depending on jurisdiction, the call to practice social distancing (and only leaving your home when it is essential to do so), etc.
They aren’t restricting truckers, who technically could carry and spread the disease because the point isn’t entirely to stop the disease at the border but to instead limit everyday movement to the essential. Assuming transport workers isolate themselves as much as anyone else does, the trade benefits far outweigh the potential harm, especially as truck drivers are often alone anyway, hard to spread it to others then. Compare this to personal travellers who meet and interact with small town folks or who travel as a group... lots of contact, lots of opportunities to share that which we don’t want shared. ;-)
There are also accounts of blatant disregard by US citizens in certain areas of the country of social distancing measures, such as reports [1] that thousands of people are flocking to beaches in Florida, which understandably causes concern among Canadians.
1 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-thousands-florida-b...
In principle, closing the border between Washington State and British Columbia is a good idea, just as closing the border between Washington and Oregon is a good idea. It just happens to turn out that it’s much easier to close the international border than the interstate border, and if you’re solving a problem, you typically do the easier parts first.
How they could test so early: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1237058531410489345.html
How they can test so many: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1238890311272796160.html
I think it's a little wreckless for the media to elevate the South Korea model without comparing ground realities. SK: basically an island, water on three sides, even more impenetrable North Korean DMZ on the other. Majority of their 50k visitors a day comes via air. Compared to Canada, while we're fortunate enough to only share border with US, but it's also a country 10x CAN population with very lax border crossing process. CAN/US exchange 300k people per day at many border crossings, some of them unmanned/unmonitored. If shit breaks down, it's basically a porous open border. Canada also has 130k air travelers per day. Both CAN & US also receives more visitors from more countries than Korea. Korean trade is done via shipping, Canada has vast supply chain dependency that networks directly into US via highways (thousands of truck drivers) and rail. The exposure, in terms of population flow and commerce, is on a totally different level. Other considerations, Korea has am ore compliant population, there's mandatory civil service and they were a dictatorship until 1979, so anyone over 50, i.e. the vulnerable population have experience with hard times knows how to fall in line (except the religious cults). They also have experience with SARS, which Toronto, Canada has as well, though our response was less than great according to our postmortem.
I feel like the media is hyping up S.Korea because it's the most reasonable democratic analogue with an adequate response. No one is going to take mimicking Taiwan, Singapore or HK model seriously because the gulf in ground realities is too large. But most medium size countries with porous border has closer conditions to China than South Korea.
Also I don't see this get mentioned at all, but S.Korea politics is pretty corrupt, at least measured against other OECD countries. Almost every one of their former presidents have been jailed or dirty for various reasons. I don't know why people trust their data given how politicized response to this virus is. The administration has every incentive to cover up as well. Time will tell.
See "The fates of former presidents of South Korea", it's a gongshow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_South_Ko...
Another example is the EU, I think. EU is not like the USA and the countries are sovereign, therefore they have very different approaches to combat the same issue so they close borders even within the union while the US states are co-ordinated from the DC so they are in the same boat and can keep the flow going.
For limiting the spread of the virus, it would be better to close borders between states or even counties.
Personally I think the border should have closed immediately after the PM’s press conference on Monday.
And Biden called such bans Xenophobic.. until apparently they weren’t. Fascinating how quickly we forget.
https://nationalfile.com/flashback-biden-opposed-trumps-chin...
My province as of a couple of days ago had tested as many people as the entire US. From our perspective, allowing unrestricted movement with the US is asking for more cases.
Now here we are with a no-shit virus outbreak and neither the Canadians nor the Mexicans are interested in having Americans freely flowing across their border.[1]
I'd want to laugh at how the real world tends to shred the fantastical political/social positions of so many people....if it weren't all so tragic. :(
You can't see germs. They are too small.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Hopefully both sides can continue to employ significant social distancing while ramping up testing and other measures, so that outbreaks can be brought under control and this situation can be as temporary as is prudently possible.
It's time to close the border.
