Five Republican senators led by Marco Rubio on Friday asked President Joe Biden's administration to ban travel between the United States and China after a spike in Chinese respiratory illness cases.
Agreed, and besides that, travel bans are about the stupidest possible measure you could take to curb the spread of a virus even if there was a new one that was dangerous.
Imagine you're in China on vacation or business. Biden says we're implementing a travel ban. Would you just shrug your shoulders and get an apartment in China? Or work out a way to get into the US via a third country?
All it does, in reality, is make it more complicated and difficult to track the people who are coming into the US from China, because preventing that completely for any length of time is more or less impossible.
Well, the WHO wants information because the pneumonia that children are getting there isn't the result of COVID and the usual other culprits. It's a bad idea to stop travel and this is definitely just politics, but I don't think it's fair to say we have no evidence of a new illness. WHO thinks something is weird.
The cause is known. It’s mycoplasma pneumoniae, a common bacterial infection that typically affects younger children. The WHO doesn’t think something is weird.
So far the comments seem very much against that. And you guys might be right. But. This case is not about the virus, it's about bacteria. China's past negligence in disclosing pandemic causing stuff has everyone on high alert. And currently there're signs of unusual illness there ans there also appear to be traces of China restricting communication of medical personnel. It simply doesn't look good.
I think I would be less dismissive if it wasn't coming from the kind of clowns that opposed pretty much all the public health efforts to reduce the spread of covid. This isn't about health for them, this is about posturing.
In a 23 November statement, the WHO said that China’s health authorities have attributed the rise in hospitalizations since October to known pathogens, such as adenoviruses, influenza virus, and RSV, which tends to cause only mild, cold-like symptoms.