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The UK government's top scientific advisor Patrick Vallance (L) and US president Donald Trump (R.)
- The UK's top scientific advisor said that enforcing a travel ban, like President Donald Trump did earlier this week, is not an effective away to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
- "In the way the world works you can't stop that, unless everybody does it all it once, and it's certainly too late now to try and do that," Patrick Vallance told a press briefing Thursday.
- Even screening people at the airports for the coronavirus is not a sure way to prevent those infected from entering, Vallance added.
- Trump banned all travel from Europe to the US from Friday, but excused the UK and Ireland. Trump has also used the virus to reignite the need for his US-Mexico border wall.
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The UK's top scientific advisor said travel bans - like the one President Donald Trump has imposed -were not an effective way of stopping the coronavirus from spreading - basically dismissing
Patrick Vallance, the UK government's chief scientific advisor, said on Thursday that Britain would not enforce a travel ban because evidence has showed it to be ineffective.
"Quite early on we looked at the question of stopping flights, and the assessment was that if we stopped flights directly from China at the beginning, unless you got something like a 95% effect, in other words, if you could stop all of the routes from China to the UK by 95%, the effect on the delay of the epidemic was minimal," Vallance said.
"I think the evidence has borne this out. In the way the world works you can't stop that, unless everybody does it all it once, and its certainly too late now to try and do that."
He made the comments at a press briefing alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which you can watch here:
Trump on Wednesday announced a ban on all travel from Europe to the US starting Friday morning, but excused those coming from the UK and Ireland.
Vallance on Thursday noted that even screening people for the virus at airports is not a sure way to prevent those infected from entering.
"The screening measures and so on, [at] airports sort of sounded sensible, but we know that, for example, the first case in the US went through a screening measure, and that was the first person that wasn't detected, and popped up," he said.
"So these things sound great but don't always work."
Reuters
President Donald Trump delivers remarks to the news media during a meeting with bankers on COVID-19 Coronavirus response, inside the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington
Trump has also used the threat of coronavirus to support his US-Mexico border wall project, despite no evidence that any of the 1,215 cases in the US came from across the border.
The president has also referred to the outbreak as a "foreign virus" and sought to blame the rest of the world, despite facing criticism for dragging his feet over a meaningful federal response.
According to Trump, Europe "failed to take the same precautions [as the US] and restrict travel from China and other hotspots. As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe."
Earlier on Thursday, the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak also said travel bans don't help contain the virus
"With regard to flight bans we are always guided by the science as we make our decisions here. The advice we are getting is that there isn't evidence that interventions like closing borders or travel bans are going to have a material effect on the spread of the infections," Sunak told the BBC's "Today" radio program.
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WATCH LIVE: PM @BorisJohnson holds a press conference on coronavirus https://t.co/cWQjqnwmnp
- UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) March 12, 2020