An ABC News investigation has discovered that in the three months of December 2019 and January and February 2020, after the coronavirus had already hit China, a whopping 759,493 people entered the U.S. from China. ABC News reported, “Those travelers from China included more than 228,000 Americans returning home and hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals arriving for business, academics, tourism or to visit family.”
During the same period, 343,402 people came to the United States from Italy, 418,848 from Spain and roughly 1.9 million more from Britain.
Dr. Vinayak Kumar, an internal medicine resident at the Mayo Clinic, commented, “This is an astonishing number in a short period of time, illustrating how globalized our world has become. Just as people can hop continents with amazing ease, the infections they carry can too.” He added, “I think this was bound to eventually happen. The high volume of international travel, the lack of screening, the inconsistent hand-washing and cough control … these laid down the perfect conditions for a disease to spread. Add that to a virus that is both largely asymptomatic and has a prolonged infectious period, and you have got a perfect storm of factors for a pandemic.”
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Dr. Todd Ellerin, chief of Infectious Disease at South Shore Health, stated, “SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the most disruptive infection the world has seen in the last 100 years, has some features that make it impossible to completely contain.” He noted, “Could an immediate travel ban announced by China have slowed the spread of this virus even further? Likely.”
China did not urge its citizens to avoid coming to America until late February. As the South China Morning Post reported on February 25:
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