Trump, Biden Spin China Travel Restrictions

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/trump-biden-spin-china-travel-restrictions/

 

Trump has repeatedly boasted, as he did on April 4, that “I stopped people from China very early — very, very early — from coming into our country.” On April 1, Trump said that “banning dangerous foreign travel that threatens the health of our people” was one of the actions his administration took that was “far earlier than anyone would have thought and way ahead of anybody else.”

ThinkGlobalHealth, a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, has been tracking the travel restrictions on China due to COVID-19. Its country-by-country analysis of the date and type of travel restrictions shows that in the days after the World Health Organization on Jan. 30 declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, 36 countries imposed travel restrictions, including the U.S., by Feb. 2.

“What this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” a co-author of the tracker, Samantha Kiernan, a research associate on global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us via email.

“Taking this all together, what this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” Kiernan said.

The United States announced its restrictions the day after the WHO declared a public health emergency, “and those restrictions came into effect two days later. However, to say the United States was one of the first countries to impose an entry ban on travelers from China would be incorrect,” she said. “By my count, roughly twenty countries and territories (Hong Kong) imposed entry bans similar if not more stringent than the U.S. ban prior to the United States imposing its restrictions.”

That contradicts the narratives of both Trump and Biden.