Regarding the travel advisory. Today the administration took strong action by…saying the travel advisory would last until the end of April. Since the advisory has no impact on anyone’s actions I’m not optimistic that this action will do anything at all.
While I’m talking about ineffective PR stunts, I’ll say that I think we need to consider defeating this pandemic in the same way one would measure options when cancer is detected. Maybe Im wrong, but I get the impression that small measures in fighting cancer don’t work, and in fact make it worse when it recovers. One doesn’t say, " well, chemo is unpleasant so I’ll only do a little bit of it, and I don’t want a scar so let’s not operate." Treatment is aggressively administered to as great an extent as possible commensurate with the patient’s existing health. Similarly, saying that we will advise people not to leave New York or ask people to wash their hands but try to get back to normal operations as soon as possible will hurt more in the long run than just going all-in and enacting nationwide aggressive measures like the rest of the world. In short: lack of any meaningful national action will make this problem worse.