> Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?

This would be a meaningful response if it was a Wuhan travel ban. But it wasn't. It was a China travel ban.

Beijing, for instance, had ~300 total cases at the time the China travel ban was put in place. Paris, at the time that the EU travel ban was put in place had multiple thousands. The prevalence of COVID in the EU was more than an order of magnitude higher when the EU travel ban was put in place.

> If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]

Travel bans can work if you ban travel from places with a high case load. We didn't do that, though. We banned travel from places that we politically disliked, and didn't ban travel from places that we liked. Unsurprisingly, the virus didn't care about our political preferences...

> Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]

I live in WA. It was not a major[1] outbreak. New York was the first major outbreak, and very, very quickly overtook WA in case numbers.

> The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases.

By late-February, COVID was completely out of control in Europe. By that point, anyone who thought that the EU had the ability to 'control the spread from a small number of imported cases' was either blind, or crazy, or just woke up from a two-month-long coma. They were way past the point of having to deal with a 'small number of imported cases' - they were at the point where uncontrolled community spread was overwhelming national hospital systems, and national lockdowns were being instituted.

And through all this time, we were welcoming European travelers with open arms.

I understand all of your arguments, and all the disaster mitigation steps you outline make sense - but they were not applied consistently to the two regions. By every metric, China was doing better at the time of the travel ban from it. By every metric, we should have banned travel from Europe in mid-February. We didn't, because we like the EU.

[1] I mean, it was major, if the baseline is compared to zero. It was not major if compared to what NYC went through a week later. NYC went from having one Covid case on March 1st, to 1,000 deaths by March 31st. New York state had more COVID cases than any country in the world by April 10th. [2] Meanwhile, Washington went from one case in January 21st, to one death on Feb 29th, to 247 deaths by March 31st. [4]

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/historical-timeline-of-covid-19...

[3] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/coronavirus-washington-stat...

[4] Was the Washington outbreak the first one? Yes. Did it become a major one? Yes, by mid-March. Was New York worse off by every metric at that point? Also yes. Was New York a complete disaster zone by mid-April? Also yes. It was seeing a thousand deaths a day.