A tragic homecoming
The Trump administration’s chaotic ban on travel from Europe didn’t slow down the coronavirus, said Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Aaron Davis in The Washington Post. In fact, it made it spread even faster.
TO KEEP NEW cases from entering our shores,” President 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 effect. 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. The screeners waved him through with a cursory temperature check. He was given instructions to selfisolate that struck him as absurd given the conditions he had just encountered. “I can guarantee you that people were infected” in that trans-Atlantic gauntlet, said Siebert, who tested positive for the virus two days later.
“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. Epidemiologists say 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. The crush of travelers triggered by Trump’s announcement only added to that viral load. N MARCH 13, the day the European travel restrictions were implemented, there were only 3,714 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the United States, and just 176 deaths had been recorded. For much of the preceding month Trump had predicted the virus would quickly recede and downplayed its severity. “It will go away,” he declared on March 10, one day before his address from the Oval Office. “Just stay calm. It will go away.”
Behind the scenes, however, senior officials had been agitating for weeks to consider expanding travel restrictions beyond China. After the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic on March 11, members of the administration’s coronavirus task force and other White House officials gathered in a tense meeting in the Cabinet Room.
A small contingent then gathered around Trump in the Oval Office. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was against a ban on travel from Europe, officials said, vociferously arguing about its potentially damaging effects on the economy. But others, including Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser,
Oand Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, argued the United States could no longer justify the risk of allowing travel from Europe to continue unimpeded.
Trump sided with the majority. But the magnitude of the undertaking— constricting one of the busiest air travel corridors on the planet— seemed to escape him. And the logistical requirements of implementing this plan on a 48-hour timetable were not even meaningfully discussed, officials said. Instead, Trump and his inner circle seemed focused on staging the announcement for maximum political impact. Jared Kushner, the president’s adviser and son-in-law, urged Trump to deliver a formal speech that evening. Kushner then joined senior policy adviser Stephen Miller in the latter’s office to work on a draft. The duo were still making edits until shortly before Trump was scheduled to go live on television at 9 p.m. “The president was in a bad mood,” one official said. As he settled into his chair, Trump cursed about a stain on his shirt. “He wasn’t convinced the speech was a good idea.”
It was only the second Oval Office address of his presidency, reflecting the gravity of the moment. But the result was a stumbling performance in which Trump struggled to follow the text on the teleprompter and committed a series of gaffes. “Never has a less prepared set of remarks been delivered from that room,” said a former administration official.
The new restrictions included “exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings,” he said. But few caught that important caveat after his opening declaration that the United States was “suspending all travel from Europe.” As networks cut away, Trump was caught muttering a drawn-out “okayyyyy” as he slumped in his seat. Within days, he was blaming Kushner, telling aides that he shouldn’t have listened to his son-in-law.
AT DULLES INTERNATIONAL Airport outside Washington, the cabin door on United Flight 989, headed for Frankfurt, Germany, had just been secured when Trump’s speech began airing on television networks. As he spoke, passengers began rising from their seats in panic. Brandishing bulletins about the speech on their cellphones, some pushed for the exits. “He said they’re closing the borders,” one passenger said. “I want off this plane.” The pilot and cabin crew began making frantic calls to supervisors for guidance. Bobbie Mas, a veteran flight attendant, dialed a hotline for United employees, then the company’s staffing office at Dulles, but no one had answers.
She then entered the cockpit to speak to the captain, who would be first in line for any major air travel advisories. The captain contacted United’s operations desk—the nerve center of the airline—but officials there were similarly scrambling for details. The only warning conveyed to the airline was a call that United’s then chief executive, Oscar Munoz, got from an administration official “literally minutes” before Trump began speaking, a company spokesman said. The official provided no details about what Trump would be saying except that it pertained to air travel.
By the time the Boeing 777 departed for Frankfurt two hours later, nearly every U.S. citizen had gotten off the plane. For many, the decision was driven by the erroneous impression created by the president that they risked being stranded in Europe. Among those who deplaned was Mas, who is also a union representative with the Association of Flight Attendants. Worried that she had not packed enough prescription medicine to last a month trapped in Europe, she said she asked to get off an aircraft for the first time in her 21-year career. “There was fear and chaos,” she said.
Save for the tense days that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she said, “I have never seen anything like it.”
More chaos was in store. Even when given accurate details on the policy, many travelers rushed home to the U.S., fearing the administration might abruptly switch course and end the exemption. Airlines’ websites and phone lines were inundated in the hours after Trump’s Oval Office address. American Airlines fielded about 700,000 calls on March 12, a spokesman said, more than five times the number on a typical day. Travel across the Atlantic surged.
Gate attendants began making panicked calls after encountering symptomatic passengers. “We had customer agents calling the security desk by the hundreds, telling us about individuals that have the symptoms,” the official said. “Our answer was to follow policy,” which meant they were not to be kept off aircraft unless they were demonstrably unfit to fly or had recently traveled to China.
RAVELERS WHO ARRIVED in the U.S. before the restrictions kicked in faced crowded planes and extended waits even without the additional layer of medical screenings. But the next wave of travelers, which began arriving March 14, confronted scenes out of a public health nightmare. The number of arriving passengers had in fact plummeted by the first day under the new restrictions. Just 19,418 passengers arrived from designated countries
Tin Europe, less than half as many as on the previous day. But even the dramatically reduced passenger volume overwhelmed airport screeners.
Alarming photos and expressions of outrage lit up social media throughout March 14. “To find yourself waiting four hours in a crowded customs hall is not social distancing,” a passenger arriving in San Francisco posted. “Fix that or fail.” JFK Airport in New York had “turned into a #CoronaVirus breeding ground,” one traveler tweeted, where teeming crowds were being subjected to “useless enhanced #COVID19 screening measures.”
The most disturbing scenes emerged from Chicago’s O’Hare. By late evening, conditions had become so unsafe that Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker began delivering broadsides about the crush of people on Twitter. “Since this is the only communication medium you pay attention to,” he tweeted, taking explicit aim at the president, “you need to do something NOW.”
Yet even as the crowds massed at the airport, experts were already warning that it was too late. “Can anyone justify the European travel restriction, scientifically?” Tom Bossert, a former homeland security adviser at the National Security Council, asked a group of public health experts in an email sent late on the evening of March 11. The resounding answer he got was no. By mid-February, weeks before the Trump administration acted, European strains were already established in New York, where they multiplied in the city’s crowded streets and subways before fanning out to the rest of the country. The virus was already too widespread in the United States for travel curbs alone to make any difference.
“Horse out of the barn,” said Stuart Ray, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and expert on infectious diseases. The plan also depended on authorities’ ability to trace individuals exposed by incoming travelers. This entails obtaining passenger manifests from airlines and contacting anyone who sat within several rows of someone who tests positive. But that protocol was rendered pointless by the chaos in airports.
Siebert, the student who studied abroad, appears to have encountered all of these issues upon his return from Madrid. After Siebert filled out the CDC questionnaire and reported his previous symptoms, the screener took his temperature and stepped away briefly. “You’re good, just go selfisolate,” the screener said when he came back, according to Siebert.
Exhausted, the New York University drama student retrieved his bags and was greeted by family members who took him home. Siebert, 21, said he was never contacted about any of the information he reported to officials at the airport. The next day, Siebert went to be tested at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. The results came back confirming his infection. 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 European travel restrictions. According to the CDC, only 140 cases of infection were either identified by airport evaluations or 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-to– United States flights since the restrictions began. Iberia Flight 6275—the one Siebert took to get home—was not among them.
A version of this article was originally published in The Washington Post. Used with permission.