According to an analysis of data collected in both countries, the day since Chinese officials disclosed about the coronavirus outbreak to international health officials on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel.
430,000 People Have Travelled From China to U.S.
The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Newark, and Detroit. Reportedly, thousands of them flew directly from Wuhan, the center of the pandemic, as American public health officials were only beginning to assess the risks to the United States.
The data revealed that flights continued this past week as well with passengers traveling from Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, under rules that exempt Americans and some others from the clampdown that took effect on Feb. 2. The report also revealed that a total of 279 flights from China have arrived in the United States since then, and screening procedures have been uneven.
President Trump has repeatedly suggested that his travel measures impeded the virus’s spread in the United States. He said on Tuesday, “I do think we were very early, but I also think that we were very smart because we stopped China. That was probably the biggest decision we made so far.” Last month, he has said, “We’re the ones that kept China out of here.”
However, the data reveals that the travel measures might be effective, but may have come too late to have “kept China out” specifically when recently the health officials have revealed that at least 25 percent of people infected with the virus may never show symptoms.
During the first half of January, when Chinese officials were underplaying the severity of the outbreak, no travellers from China were screened for potential exposure to the virus. Health screening began in mid-January, but only for a number of travellers who had been in Wuhan and only at the airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. However, about 4,000 people had already entered the US directly from Wuhan by that time, the report quoted VariFlight, an aviation data company based in China. The measures were expanded to all passengers from China two weeks later.
In January, before the broad screening was in place, there were over 1,300 direct passenger flights from China to the United States, according to VariFlight and two American firms, MyRadar and FlightAware. About 381,000 travellers flew directly from China to the United States that month, about a quarter of whom were American, according to data from the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration.
In addition, untold others arrived from China on itineraries that first stopped in another country. While actual passenger counts for indirect fliers were not available, Sofia Boza-Holman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said they represented about a quarter of travellers from China. The restrictions, she added, reduced all passengers from the country by about 99 percent.
About 60 percent of travellers on direct flights from China in February were not American citizens, according to the most recently available government data. Most of the flights were operated by Chinese airlines after American carriers halted theirs.
In a statement on Friday, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, described Mr. Trump’s travel restrictions as a “bold decisive action which medical professionals say will prove to have saved countless lives.” The policy took effect, he said, at a time when the global health community did not yet “know the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread.”
Trump administration officials have also said they received significant pushback about imposing the restrictions even when they did. At the time, the World Health Organization was not recommending travel restrictions, Chinese officials rebuffed them and some scientists questioned whether curtailing travel would do any good. Some Democrats in Congress said they could lead to discrimination.
