Europe ban led to a viral infusion
Spread likely in crush of travelers
WASHINGTON — In the final days before the United States faced a full-blown epidemic, President Donald Trump made a last-ditch attempt to prevent people infected with the coronavirus from reaching the country.
“To keep new cases from entering our shores,” Trump said in an Oval Office address on March 11, “we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United
States for the next 30 days.”
Across the Atlantic, Jack Siebert, an American college student spending a semester in Spain, was battling raging headaches, shortness of breath and fevers that touched 104 degrees. Concerned about his condition for travel but alarmed by the president’s announcement, his parents scrambled to book a flight home for their son — an impulse shared by thousands of Americans who rushed to get flights out of Europe.
Siebert arrived at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago three days later as the new U.S. restrictions — including mandatory medical screenings — went into ef
fect. He encountered crowds of people packed in tight corridors, stood in lines in which he snaked past other travelers for nearly five hours and tried to direct any cough or sneeze into his sleeve.
When he finally reached the coronavirus checkpoint near baggage pickup, Siebert reported his prior symptoms and described his exposure in Spain. But the screeners waved him through with a cursory temperature check. He was given instructions to self-isolate that struck him as absurd given the conditions he had just encountered at the airport.
“I can guarantee you that people were infected” in that trans-Atlantic gantlet, said Siebert, who tested positive for the virus two days later in Chicago. “It was people passing through a pinhole.”
The sequence was repeated at airports across the country that weekend. Harrowing scenes of interminable lines and unmasked faces crammed in confined spaces spread across social media.
The images showed how a policy intended to block the pathogen’s entry into the United States instead delivered one final viral infusion. As those exposed travelers fanned out into U.S. cities and suburbs, they became part of an influx from Europe that went unchecked for weeks and helped to seal the country’s coronavirus fate.
Epidemiologists contend the U.S. outbreak was driven overwhelmingly by viral strains from Europe rather than China. More than 1.8 million travelers entered the United States from Europe in February alone as that continent became the center of the pandemic. Infections reached critical mass in New York and other cities well before the White House took action, according to studies mapping the virus’s spread. The crush of travelers triggered by Trump’s announcement only added to that viral load.
“We closed the front door with the China travel ban,” New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last month. In waiting to cut off travel from Europe, he said, “we left the backdoor wide open.”
White House officials noted the president was widely criticized for the move to limit travel from Europe, with many saying it was too draconian at the time. “The president took bold, early action that I think few leaders would be willing to take — and because of that he saved countless lives,” spokeswoman Alyssa Farah said.
The lapses surrounding the spread from Europe stand alongside other breakdowns — in developing diagnostic tests, securing protective gear and imposing social distancing guidelines — as reasons the United States became so overwhelmed.
“We kept foreign nationals out of the country but not the virus,” said Tom Bossert, who served as adviser of homeland security at the White House until last year. The move to restrict travel came when it was more urgent to arrest the spread of infections already in the U.S., Bossert said. “That was a strategic miscalculation.”
This article tracing the administration’s response to the Europe threat is based on interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials, as well as public health experts, airline executives and passengers. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments of events, decisions and internal administration debates.
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The Europe restrictions, which remain in effect, bar entry to nonU.S. citizens or permanent residents from 26 countries.
The decision came at a time when the country was still resisting other measures critical to containing the outbreak. Schools remained open, states were not yet issuing stay-at-home orders, and many officials were still emphasizing hand-washing as an adequate means of preventing infection.
Behind the scenes, senior officials had been agitating for weeks to consider expanding travel restrictions beyond China. Deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, who had been based in Beijing as a journalist, argued during meetings in February that transmission was higher than being reported in China and that if community spread began in Europe there was little prospect of containing it.
By the third week in February, the fears about Europe were becoming reality. On Feb. 22, Italy issued quarantine orders on 11 municipalities in the northern part of the country. It closed schools, canceled public events and halted train travel in the same region. Because there are no constraints on crossing borders within continental Europe, the developments in Italy meant that spread into other countries was inevitable.
But Pottinger and a handful of other officials who shared his concerns faced opposition from powerful administration figures fearing enormous economic fallout. Among those arguing most vehemently against curbing travel from Europe, officials said, were Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser.
Even health experts at times seemed skeptical. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, at first reacted skeptically to limiting travel from Europe, saying in a February meeting in the Situation Room that the available data did not support such a move, the senior official said. A spokesperson for Fauci declined to comment, referring questions to the White House.
Debate on the issue was also derailed by turmoil on the coronavirus task force. Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the panel on Feb. 26 as Italy confronted a surging outbreak. Officials said it took a week or more for Pence to get up to speed on the threat and array of possible responses.
Serious deliberations about Europe didn’t resume until midMarch. By then, Pottinger had gained a new ally. Deborah Birx, who had joined the task force earlier that month, entered a White House meeting armed with worrisome data on a surge in cases in northern Italy, as well as numbers that showed accelerating spread across Europe. Then, on March 11, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic.
Mnuchin remained against the move. But others present, including Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, and Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, argued the U.S. could no longer justify the risk of allowing travel from Europe to continue unimpeded.
Trump sided with the majority. But the logistical requirements of implementing this plan on a 48hour timetable were not even meaningfully discussed, officials said.
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Current and former officials said key agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation, had no meaningful input in the nature of the Europe restrictions or how and when they would be executed. An administration official said officials from both agencies were present at meetings where the ban was discussed.
The administration scrambled to round up contractors to conduct temperature checks on tens of thousands of passengers. Officials said the magnitude of the mobilization was unprecedented. Even so, the contractors were overrun by the rush of travelers.
Even the most basic screening steps seemed to backfire. The CDC failed to distribute a new paper questionnaire in time for it to be shared with airlines in advance, meaning passengers had to fill it out upon arrival. As a result, travelers found themselves reaching around one another for slips of paper and pencils, risking transmission as the bottlenecks got worse.
A photo showed thousands of travelers in line at Dallas-Fort Worth without masks or other protection. “This will not flatten the curve,” the caption accompanying the tweet said.
Within hours of Trump delivering the Oval Office address, experts were warning that it was already too late.
Siebert, 21, said he was never contacted about the information he reported to officials at the airport. The next day, he independently went to be tested at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. A day later, the results came back confirming his infection.
“Ultimately, I am a culprit in bringing coronavirus back to the United States,” he said. His mother also came down with the illness, though her symptoms appeared before Siebert’s return. The two isolated themselves for weeks in the household, he said, and no other family members became sick.
Siebert was among 110,000 passengers screened during the first four days of the Europe travel restrictions. According to the CDC, only 140 cases of infection were identified either by airport evaluations or subsequent test results reported to the center by local health authorities.
If other travelers were exposed by Siebert’s infection, it is unlikely any of them were ever told. A CDC spokesman said the center has conducted “contact tracing” investigations on nine Europe-toUnited States flights since the restrictions began. Iberia Flight 6275 — the one Siebert took to get home — was not among them.