Outtakes: Do Travel Bans Work?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have embraced travel restrictions as a means of containing — or keeping out — the virus. But this is a blunt instrument — and, in most cases, not a particularly effective one.
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Transcript
Elmira Bayrasli: Welcome to Opinion Has It Outtakes. I’m Elmira Bayrasli. We’ve got a shorter episode for you today. We’re following up with last week’s guest, Jennifer Nuzzo. Jennifer is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health and Security. In our last conversation, she showed us how likely another pandemic is and proposed strategies for mitigating the risks. But we still haven’t escaped the COVID-19 pandemic. The global vaccine rollout has run up against major obstacles.
Archive Recording: While the US is on track to have enough vaccines for every American adult by May, other countries will have to wait a while longer.
Archive Recording: It’s an issue known as vaccine nationalism: the idea that rich countries would purchase vaccines for their populations first, and that could actually prolong the pandemic around the world.
Archive Recording: Much of continental Europe is suffering through a third and brutal wave of COVID-19. Making matters worse, the drive to vaccinate throughout the European Union is faltering badly.
EB: The longer the vaccine process takes, the more likely new variants are to emerge.
Archive Recording: The government has confirmed that indeed, a novel variant of the coronavirus has been found in India. [It] has been detected.
Archive Recording: With cases on the rise, there’s concern over the discovery of a new double-mutant strain.
Archive Recording: Today, the mayor’s office urged the city to stay calm about a potential new variant, telling folks to just keep doing what we’re already doing to stop the spread of the virus.
Archive Recording: New York City officials are quite concerned about this variant, which is known as B.1.526.
EB: To contain new, more dangerous virus variants, many governments have implemented, sustained, or strengthened travel restrictions. They seem to believe it’s worth the costs, including a devastated tourism industry. Jennifer disagrees. Jennifer, I want to ask about the use of travel bans to stop the spread of the disease. On the surface, these bans seem to make a lot of sense, but do they actually work?
Jennifer Nuzzo: Here’s the problem with travel bans: I mean, if we could figure out exactly where in the world the virus was and where it wasn’t, and base travel bans on that complete knowledge, and had the resources to implement the travel bans, then it would stand to reason. Listen, if you want to keep the virus out, why wouldn’t you do that? The reality is it is very difficult to know where in the world the virus is and where it isn’t, or it often is very difficult. And then come important implementation challenges.
So what do I mean? I’m just going to be specific about it, because I think it’s hard to talk about in the abstract. In the case of COVID-19, [when] the United States implemented its ban on travel from China, first of all, we were relatively late to do that as a country. When we did that, the virus was already in multiple countries, some of which we knew about because we knew that there were outbreaks, locally transmitted outbreaks occurring in multiple countries, but also some of which we may not have known, about because this virus has shown its ability to circulate silently. We now expect that it actually arrived in the United States much earlier than the first detected case. It may have been in the United States as early as November or December, and yet we didn’t implement our travel bans until the end of January. That’s a challenge: just knowing from where do you ban travelers. And then, even if you could ban from all the places, you can’t really truly ban travel because you always have Americans coming back from those places. So what do you do with those Americans?
Well, we chose, in the case of the COVID-related travel bans, to either require people to quarantine at home, which is never quite a perfect thing, or to put people up in hotels for a two-week period. What happened during that time was that our health officials were spending all of their time ferrying around travelers to different hotels and undisclosed locations because they were worried about security – that they would be potentially subject to security threats. So they had to find quarantine facilities in hotels and they spent all of their time basically watching people in quarantine and that really drew away energy, resources, and bandwidth from the work of domestic preparedness. I can tell you, we met with state officials after the travel bans, but before COVID heated up, and sort of asked them about their plans for responding to COVID. I was really dismayed to find that they really hadn’t begun the work of thinking about what they would do for COVID, because they were sort of assuming that it was a problem “over there,” meaning in another country, and that we were sort of keeping the virus out. But what we now know is that the virus had been circulating for quite a bit of time in the United States before we were able to recognize it. We also know that we had banned travel from largely China for quite a bit of time. And yet the giant explosive outbreak in New York was likely tied to travelers from Europe.
I think as a theoretical construct, travel restrictions feel like they make sense, but the reality is implementing them never really achieves what we would hope it would. And, potentially, it has the ability to kind of drain resources away from other efforts.
EB: A few countries have benefited from the use of travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Archive Recording: New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced that the country had eliminated the coronavirus.
Archive Recording: The Pacific Island nation of five million people implemented one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, shutting its borders, closing schools and workplaces ...
Archive Recording: The strategy paid off with a low infection rate and a very low death toll.
Archive Recording: Next door, Australia has seen comparable success in battling the virus.
EB: But for these countries, travel restrictions weren’t the solution. Instead, they enabled governments to implement other more effective measures.
JN: There are some countries that I think used travel restrictions wisely. I think New Zealand and Australia and some other places were able to implement the travel restrictions as a way to buy time, to ramp up their domestic preparedness. Had the United States done that, I think we would have been in a better situation, but it still seems unlikely to me that we, as such a large country with so many international dependencies, could have truly stopped travel in a way that these other countries were able to and that we clearly didn’t use whatever time we may have bought ourselves, if at all, to boost our domestic preparedness.
EB: Usually travel bans end up either distracting from more effective pandemic preparations or deterring countries from sharing information about possible outbreaks due to fears of costly trade and travel restrictions.
JN: Exactly. Yeah. It’s really difficult to get the picture of what’s happening in the world enough to know which countries should be on your travel list or which shouldn’t. I mean, it really almost creates a situation where if you really want to use travel restrictions, you almost have to ban it from everywhere because you don’t really know, but that’s incredibly disruptive. I mean, we see a slowdown in global trade when that happens. Part of the reason why we had a hard time getting supplies was in part because of a slowdown in global travel.
EB: That was Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health and Security, and that’s it for this week’s Outtakes. Thanks for listening and stay tuned. New full-length episodes of Opinion Has It are coming soon. Until then, I’m Elmira Bayrasli.
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