Just so silly. More theater. We're already seeing millions of new cases per week including the strains with mutations to the target spike proteins - what problem does this solve?
In order to stop seeing "millions of new cases", every source of new cases should be reduced.
International travel is an orderly place to apply a filter, just as hospitals test all admits (even those without symptoms).
Blocking all visitors from specific places – even places with lower rates of prevalence than here! – was silly theater. This is actually well-targeted to reducing the interactions of the likely-infected with the uninfected.
(If a city or state/province even wanted to set up internal borders, & require on-the-spot quick antigen tests to enter regions of actual or attempted-infection control, perhaps even anonymously, that'd also be a well-targeted intervention far better than the other theater we've been fed so far.)
Even in expensive hospital systems in the SF Bay Area, it's not every patient getting a test, much to the chagrin of some of my friends working at the ones that aren't doing universal testing.
Well, it would've decreased the chances of a more infectious strain becoming widespread in the US if it had been implemented months ago. It could decrease the chances of worse strains that might originate outside the US becoming established moving forward.
Sure they can, but reducing the geographic spread would reduce the chances of those randomly occurring variants spreading quickly around the world. I would expect other countries to require testing of international flights for the same reasons.
The US is performing badly when it comes to controlling the virus, but it could still get significantly worse.
