Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

In retrospect, we could never stop the virus at our borders. At best, we could have delayed its fuller entry. Screening programs and travel bans were long known to have limited effect in preventing or even slowing epidemics.28 One widely cited modeling study, which examined the impact of travel bans in the setting of a pandemic flu, found that implementing strict travel bans that reduced infections by 99.9 percent would delay the peak of a hypothetical US pandemic by just six weeks. This was if the restrictions were implemented early, on day thirty of a hypothetical foreign epidemic that had not yet spread discernibly to America, and the estimate was modeled from influenza, which is less contagious than SARS-CoV-2.29 In other words, even draconian bans on travel, implemented to stop a virus that was less contagious than SARS-CoV-2, would, at best, be temporizing. It would buy some time; it wouldn’t prevent the epidemic.