Donald Trump has been eager to tout his decisive action to ban (some) travel from (some) COVID-19 hotspots in a too-late attempt to limit infections in the already-infected United States. Now our country is going to get a taste of its own medicine: As other nations begin to curb their own virus spread, they are planning on easing travel restrictions between them while enforcing tighter travel bans for places that remain pandemic hotspots.
That's us. We're one of the hotspots. With over a million COVID-19 infections, it's Americans who aren't going to be welcome in much of the rest of the world because of our lax health procedures, rampant disease spread, and a government more focused on lying about the extent of the problem than addressing it.
The Daily Beast reports on the planned easing of those restrictions throughout Europe, and on the notable absence of the United States in any of those "reopening" plans. "None of the plans account for Americans or other foreign nationals who have residency in any of [those] countries," they report. That means your U.S. passport won't allow travel between two countries that are allowing their own citizens to cross back and forth.
To be blunt, your passport makes you a risk.
Things are likely to get dicier than that, however, if U.S. state "reopenings" result in the predicted rise in infections later this month. No country is going to be eager to host citizens from a nation so cavalier about spreading the disease, and every country is going to remain keenly aware of how quickly new hotspots can crop up from single infected visitors.
Look at our record on this from their perspective. We've got a nationwide outbreak with no overall nationwide plan for combatting it. Our testing and tracking remains woefully insufficient. Most to the point, however, our national government has lied, over and over and over, about the extent of the pandemic here, about government actions to contain it, and about our alleged success.
Yup. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Donald Trump has turned us into a hotspot more dangerous than China.