> The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. Made worse by the fact that China itself was nailing domestic flight from Wuhan to the pillars of shame for eternity.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...

Maybe research a bit more into WHO guideline on banning air travel from a particular country?

The following link is from WHO statement on H1N1 back in 2009, stating:
"The Director-General recommended not to close borders and not to restrict international travel. It was considered prudent for people who are ill to delay international travel and for people developing symptoms following international travel to seek medical attention."

They have not changed their position on this, not for H1N1, not for COVID-19. And banning travel from China ONLY is just not effective, and a political posture at best. It doesn't stop people re-routing flight, nor did it stop the further spread of COVID-19 into the US, which has been found a majority to be cases from Europe.

https://www.who.int/news/item/27-04-2009-director-general-st...

> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.

No, "already Chinese tourists there" is never the reason behind their recommendation.
It 1) Doesn't stop people from re-routing flight;
2) Postures as an effort taken to curb spread, while in actuality does little;
and most importantly, 3) The majority of cases that came to US was from Europe, not China.

> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?

Not sure hard enough is the right word, but an international ban could work better. Still, the best method of restricting travel with forced manual quarantine period for ALL incoming travelers was never prevalent in the US.

> From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.

> From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)

No comment.

> Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing!

> The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.

Interesting, why describe the situation like "a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family"?

> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.

You must be jesting, no? Testing makes the problem formally worse?
So, a country should not make raising testing and laboratory capability to accurately gauge the situation and how transmissible the disease, but should instead wait for WHO to spoon-feed information. But the problem is, WHO provide statements and guidelines from statistics and reports of individual countries.

For the other "accusations", I hope you do realize that the lack of (method-wise and quantity-wise) relevant and specific testing at the beginning of the pandemic was the biggest reason why data were hard to collect, why evidence of H2H transmission were delayed in confirmation, and why CFR, R+, and other stats were not correctly estimated.

> China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.

Not sure where the evidence is for that, but it's easily explained: more time enabled further study on the virus, and it's found to survive supply chains of frozen products. You do realize that we are dealing with a new virus and scientist can make discovery about the new virus that could cause related policy to shift a 180.

> If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112

Not sure what's your point? Again, travel restriction against a single country were not helping, nor going to help. What's more, COVID-19 is different from previous epidemics in that the majority of cases are asymptomatic or presymptomatic, that it spreads before symptoms if there will be symptoms.