The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need.
Cool that would have given the US another 4 weeks to ignore the problem before it got exactly as bad it is now. You can't solve an exponential problem with a constant size reduction.
> The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need.
Yeah, there is probably nothing that the US could have done unilaterally which would have contained this. Italy was still reporting something like three total cases in mid-February. There was no more reason to quarantine or monitor travellers from there than there was anyone else in the country.
Note that even South Korea was apparently monitoring everyone and suddenly 1 person slipped through and infected like a thousand people (read this recently, don't have the link handy).
Note that Patient 31 is only the index case that caused the thousand-person cluster to be discovered, she's almost certainly not the cause of it despite various media reports that try and make it look that way. She had no recent overseas travel and no contact with known cases, I don't think anyone knows how she got it, and apparently she didn't even meet testing criteria and only got tested because some doctor ignored them on a hunch.
She probably wasn't even the first person in the Shincheonji Church in Daegu to be infected. The timeline of her infection is just too late compared to the cases at the hospital in Cheongdo potentially tied to other church members, most of the membership is much younger than her and therefore likely to display mild or no symptoms, and some of them had in fact travelled to China. If anything, it seems likely that she caught it from there rather than the other way around.
But the ending to that story is very different. South Korea did have an outbreak, but they contained it. That’s the counterfactual to “nobody could have prevented this.”
