Speaking to the nation last night, U.S. President Donald Trump said a ban on Europeans entering the United States is necessary because Europe hadn’t banned flights from China early as the U.S. had done.
“The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots as a result a large number of new clusters were seeded by travellers from Europe,” he said.
But virtually every part of this statement is untrue.
Italy imposed a ban on flights from China on 31 January, immediately after a Chinese couple in Rome tested positive for the virus. The U.S. began to restrict flights from China four days later. But while Italy enacted a full ban, the U.S. policy was only a restriction, with wide exemptions.
On February 4 the U.S. State Department issued a level 4 travel advisory mandating that foreign citizens who had been to China be turned away, and Americans who had been to China must undergo screening and possibly be put in quarantine for 14 days. But the restrictions contained wide exemptions, largely because of fears over the economic impacts of a full ban. Flight routes between the U.S. and China have been steadily cancelled over the past month, but in a piecemeal fashion and at the discretion of airlines.
By contrast, the Italian ban four days earlier was complete, with no exemptions. Italy was the first and only EU country to have a flight ban from China, and yet the country is now the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak in Europe with the highest number of cases outside China.
EU politicians are furious about Trump’s characterisation, not only because he has mischaracterised the European response, but also because there is no evidence that it was Europeans who brought Coronavirus to the United States. In fact, experts say it most likely came directly from China.
"The only country in Europe that has banned direct flights from China when the Coronavirus started was Italy,” says Pascal Canfin, the chair of the European Parliament’s public health committee and a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron. “Italy is today the country which is most hit by Coronavirus. So the least I can say is that stopping flights was not an effective response for Italy to stop importing the virus.”
“It didn’t work in the past in Europe regarding flights from China, so I don’t see why it should work from Europe to the U.S.,” he adds. “It proved to be ineffective in the Italian case."
The EU executive and the 27 leaders of EU member countries issued a joint statement this morning saying they were blindsided by Trump’s oval office announcement, and had not had any communication from U.S. officials.
“The EU disapproves of the fact that the U.S. decision to impose a travel ban was taken unilaterally and without consultation,” the statement reads. “The Coronavirus is a global crisis, not limited to any continent and it requires cooperation rather than unilateral action.”
The ban is due to take effect tomorrow, but a spokesperson for the European Commission said today they still do not understand the details of what exactly the ban is, because they have still received no communication from the U.S. as of this afternoon. “You have just as much information as I have,” he told journalists.
Although Trump’s statement seemed to suggest that all flights from Europe to the US would end, including those carrying goods, the White House later clarified that goods would continue to be shipped, and U.S. citizens could still fly.
Canfin says he was dismayed by the president’s statements, and noted that the EU can’t put in place flight bans, as the president seemed to suggest.
"Decisions on banning flights, closing shops, or asking pupils to stay home are not made at the European level, but only at national level,” he says. “So you have different responses in different countries. There is no competence at EU level to take such decisions.”
Asked why the United Kingdom hadn’t imposed a ban on flights from China last month, the country’s chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance said today: “We looked at it. Even if we stopped all flights and had a 95% reduction, the effect on the delay of the epidemic was only a day or two. And realistically we could get at best a 50% reduction. This has been born out, with the way the world works you cannot stop that unless everyone decides to do this at once.”
While some in Europe have suggested that the EU should respond by banning flights from the U.S., Canfin says he does not believe this would be productive.
"Our mindset in Europe is precisely not to enter into a retaliation process with the U.S. - a sort of 'you ban our flights, we ban yours'. There wouldn’t be any rationale behind it, it would just be a sort of political war using the coronavirus as a pretext to enter into a fight.”
But he suggested that serious diplomatic and economic damage has been done by the decision, without necessarily any benefit to public health.
"I think that what we expect from a country like the U.S., an ally, and from a leader like the US president, is not playing the blame game,” he says. “It’s to show solidarity, to ask what can be done by the U.S. to help, not to use this as an electoral tool. That’s very disappointing, even if you still expect anything positive from Trump regarding the U.S. relationship with Europe."
The ban has sent global markets tumbling today, and caused near panic among European airlines, which operate many flights across the Atlantic. Today the industry association Airlines for Europe write to EU lawmakers asking for urgent assistance.