[Goose]

There are four international airports in Taiwan.

True, but aren't three of them colocated with Air Force bases? Pretty easy to control passengers in those cases.

There are slightly over 5,000 commercial airports in the United States and over 14,000 airports for private use, along with a little over 300 military airports.  American air carriers transported 111.1 million international passengers, and foreign air carriers transported 122.5 million international passengers to and from the United States in calendar 2018 on 1,621,000 flights, per the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Perhaps a slightly different degree of difficulty to shut down international travel in the USA versus that of Taiwan.

Most of these airports are not port of entries, so we really can't count them.

---

52 US airports have IATA codes, which are the airports most likely to have regular international flights.


https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/m...rports.htm



The US gets more inbound passengers than any other country in the world, but on a per capita basis, it ranks 22nd, behind countries like Australia, New Zealand, Singapore.



https://www.citypopulation.de/en/world/b...ngers.html



BC

Thanks for digging this information out. To do what Taiwan did, we would have required a plan at 52 different locations to take all passengers entering the county to accommodations where they could be housed for 14 days. Remember, there was no SIP in force, so we would have needed to do this when hotels were still serving domestic tourists. We had no plan to do this, so we would have needed to improvise 52 different plans. This also doesn't include seaports, of which there are probably 20 or so major ones and many more where you can clear customs. Remember how had it was to figure out what to do with ONE cruise ship? We ended up quarantining people at Travis.

The number of passengers per airport matters some, but not much. Each of the 52 locations handle enough passengers that we would need plans at each one, all of which have different geometry, different accommodations available/not available, different land transport options. Improvising a plan at one or two places is difficult, but probably can be done fairly quickly. Improvising 52 plans cannot, especially if the hotels aren't almost empty. Renting the rooms and guarding the buildings can be fun too. Ask the Australians. I think it is very fair to say our problem is much larger than Taiwan, New Zealand, or Korea had. Australia has more ports of entry than one might think, but they took quite a while to set up their quarantine system. All these nations had a current plan to do what they did, although there were varying degrees of problem when they had to do it.

The point is that even if we had the will to move when Taiwan did, we had no plan to do so and making/implementing that plan would have been pretty much impossible. Too many locations to wing it.

[Goose]

There are four international airports in Taiwan.

True, but aren't three of them colocated with Air Force bases? Pretty easy to control passengers in those cases.

There are slightly over 5,000 commercial airports in the United States and over 14,000 airports for private use, along with a little over 300 military airports.  American air carriers transported 111.1 million international passengers, and foreign air carriers transported 122.5 million international passengers to and from the United States in calendar 2018 on 1,621,000 flights, per the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Perhaps a slightly different degree of difficulty to shut down international travel in the USA versus that of Taiwan.

Most of these airports are not port of entries, so we really can't count them.

---

52 US airports have IATA codes, which are the airports most likely to have regular international flights.


https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/m...rports.htm



The US gets more inbound passengers than any other country in the world, but on a per capita basis, it ranks 22nd, behind countries like Australia, New Zealand, Singapore.



https://www.citypopulation.de/en/world/b...ngers.html



BC

Thanks for digging this information out. To do what Taiwan did, we would have required a plan at 52 different locations to take all passengers entering the county to accommodations where they could be housed for 14 days. Remember, there was no SIP in force, so we would have needed to do this when hotels were still serving domestic tourists. We had no plan to do this, so we would have needed to improvise 52 different plans. This also doesn't include seaports, of which there are probably 20 or so major ones and many more where you can clear customs. Remember how had it was to figure out what to do with ONE cruise ship? We ended up quarantining people at Travis.

The number of passengers per airport matters some, but not much. Each of the 52 locations handle enough passengers that we would need plans at each one, all of which have different geometry, different accommodations available/not available, different land transport options. Improvising a plan at one or two places is difficult, but probably can be done fairly quickly. Improvising 52 plans cannot, especially if the hotels aren't almost empty. Renting the rooms and guarding the buildings can be fun too. Ask the Australians. I think it is very fair to say our problem is much larger than Taiwan, New Zealand, or Korea had. Australia has more ports of entry than one might think, but they took quite a while to set up their quarantine system. All these nations had a current plan to do what they did, although there were varying degrees of problem when they had to do it.

The point is that even if we had the will to move when Taiwan did, we had no plan to do so and making/implementing that plan would have been pretty much impossible. Too many locations to wing it.