he surgeon general, Vice Admiral Jerome Adams, announced on Sunday that this week would be our Pearl Harbor or 9/11 moment in dealing with the coronavirus. But if that is the case, wouldn’t we at least deal with China in 2020 the same way we immediately dealt with the cause of the Japanese invasion and the terrorist hijackers after 1941 and 2001 respectively?
While we are confined to our homes, it appears that 40,000 people have come here from China since the supposed shutoff. It’s unclear how many were Americans or Chinese nationals and from which parts of China they came, but according to the New York Times, they included “other authorized travelers,” and many came in with “spotty screening.”
The Times reports that since New Year’s Eve, 430,000 people have arrived in the U.S. on direct flights from China. All but 40,000 came in before the shutoff on February 2. ABC News reports that if you go back as far as when the virus is now known to have surfaced, not when our government officially became aware of it, that number is as high as 760,000. According to the NYT, thousands of them came directly from Wuhan.
The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Newark and Detroit. Thousands of them flew directly from Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, as American public health officials were only beginning to assess the risks to the United States.
New York and Detroit have especially been hot spots for the coronavirus outbreak.
Sens. Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley called for a shutoff much earlier in January, as did yours truly, which could have prevented more of the spread. – READ MORE
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