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DIt seems like a long time ago, when time and money were the main limitations when planning a vacation trip. The possibility of unrestricted visits to foreign countries is currently far away. This is obvious at first glance, because to limit the spread of the pandemic, it is useful to limit the movement of potentially infected people as much as possible. After all, while countries at the national level are trying to control the pandemic, it doesn’t help if new cases of infection are imported from abroad at the same time. Based on previous experience, it is not easy to answer whether this consideration is really correct, whether travel restrictions are necessary or, on the contrary, they may be dispensable in combination with other measures. The development of the number of cases is ultimately due to the combined effect of a large number of factors that are difficult to separate in their influence.
Anyone trying to understand how individual measures have worked and what that means for our future approach to the pandemic should consult scientific models. In these models, which simulate the course of the global spread of an infectious disease, the measures can be turned on and off as needed, the resulting scenarios can be compared with each other and with the available data.
For the question of the effectiveness of travel restrictions, a research group led by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London did long before the new Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus appeared. In 2007, they simulated the spread of a pandemic in the United States and Great Britain, taking into account restrictions on travel options: on the one hand, in the form of border controls, which should be able to prevent more than 90 percent of Infected people enter the country, and on the other hand, as restrictions on freedom of movement within countries. The result: the timing of the measurements is crucial. Efficient border controls can delay disease progression by a few weeks to the start of the pandemic, if there are still some cases in the country. Along with such entry control, national travel restrictions can further delay the spread of infection. Depending on the model, up to two months of time can be saved this way.
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It is now known that entry controls do not help in the case of Covid-19, since a certain proportion (previous studies have shown values of around 20 percent) of infections is asymptomatic and, in the other cases, generally between infection and the appearance of the first symptoms. 5 to 6 days British researchers led by Billy Quilty had already been investigating the efficiency with which, in this context, travelers infected with the new coronavirus could be found using body temperature controls at airports. According to their model, almost half of infected travelers, exactly 46 percent, would not be identified by such controls.
