My Take | Travel bans are useless to stop an outbreak
- Beijing says the United States has ‘inappropriately overreacted’ to the coronavirus outbreak by imposing travel bans. Washington counters that its response is ‘science-based’. Who’s right?
Mainstream scientific studies support China’s contention. A 2011 study, “Human Mobility Networks, Travel Restrictions, and the Global Spread of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic”, was conducted by a group of European computational epidemiologists and published in PLOS One, a scientific journal.
It found that “no containment was achieved by such restrictions and the virus was able to reach pandemic proportions in a short time”.
This was despite “travel-related controls during the early stage of the outbreak in an attempt to contain or slow down its international spread … along with self-imposed travel limitations contributed to a decline of about 40 per cent in international air traffic to/from Mexico following the international alert”.
A 2006 study, “Empirical Evidence for the Effect of Airline Travel on Inter-Regional Influenza Spread in the United States”, also available on PLOS One, was conducted by a team of Harvard and MIT researchers to gauge the effects of temporary flight bans enacted across the US after the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the spread of seasonal flu.
It concluded that the ban managed to delay the peak of the flu season by less than two weeks, but that the effectiveness of travel restrictions “is still uncertain”.