Bomboclot416 wrote:The 30th of January, the WHO declares a global health emergency and a day later Trump suspends travel from China. This is well before it was listed as a pandemic and way before Canada or ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD did the same sort of measure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_restrictions_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic
There's a listing of when countries instituted travel bans. The US was the first. Siginifcantly ahead of the rest of the world.
Fact checking as an industry is fairly dumb, but this is a handy run down of the actual restrictions put in place: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel-restrictions/
https://www.cato.org/blog/timeline-list-us-immigration-actions-covid-19
So yeah that's not actually true. The United States didn't suspend travel from China on January 31st. They also never instituted a "travel ban" from China. On Jan 31st, the US announced that effective on Feb. 2nd, "all non citizens who were in China in the last 14 days, except for LPRs, spouses of LPRs or U.S. citizens, unmarried children under 21, siblings under 21 of U.S. citizens or LPRs under 21, child of U.S. citizens or LPRs, crewmembers, government officials, or those exempted by the Secretary of State or DHS." were going to be denied entry. And everyone who was able to travel to the US from China had to self quarantine for 14 days. Then on Feb 1 they announced they would stop processing visas in China from Feb 3rd until Feb 7th. Then on Feb 10th they announced suspension of regular visa processing in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenyang. That's it. Those are the restrictions for travel from China. There's also an obvious exception for shipping and transport of goods because that could never be shutdown. And then there has been a lot of hindsight and studies showing that those restrictions didn't actually do much, or were inconclusive, when it comes to preventing infection transmission in the US because of the hundreds of thousands of travelers that came before the restrictions were put in place, and that places like NY were seeded by travelers from Europe not China. Repeating Trump's lie about his foresight and banning travel from China doesn't make it a fact, and it also ignores how effective it was.
All of that aside, just in general trying to pretend that Trump has responded quickly or well to covid is insane on it's face. We've all been alive for the last 5 months. No amount of goal post shifting or hand waving is going to change that.