• Question: Do you think if you stopped people from entering and exiting countries all over the world covid will die down without damaging the economy?

    Asked by LowennaF on 8 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Valerie Vancollie

      Valerie Vancollie answered on 8 Jan 2022:

      I don’t think we could really stop people entering/exiting countries all over the world without damaging the economy. A lot of how our economies work at present involves people crossing borders, not to mention whole sectors that rely on it.

      Some countries also have borders drawn in ways that means closing them would be problematic. Take the Belgian/Dutch border for instance, there are places where it runs right through the middle of towns. And there are plenty of other places around the world where people live on one side of a border but work/go to school/shop in another country.

      No borders are foolproof either, there are plenty of places for people to cross if they are determined enough. If you make travel illegal, people will find other ways of going.

      Additionally, we have now found that covid is endemic in certain wildlife populations which won’t respect national borders. Like the deer in North America.

      We also need to be careful with strategies that target specific countries or areas of the world when new variants appear. As happened so recently with Omicron, as then countries will be less likely to share information if they fear being targeted as a result of informing the world that they have discovered a new variant. It could also disincentivise governments from performing genomic surveillance, which means everyone will have less information to work with.

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 8 Jan 2022:

      No I don’t think that’s possible. Covid has spread to very country in the world… some like New Zealand where able to contain it but they will have to re-open eventually because they make a lot of money from tourism. Also if there is still lots of infections happening within the countries the closure of borders won’t help.. it can maybe slow down the spread of new variants but out best bet is trying to vaccinate everybody! 🙂

    • Photo: Chloe Jones

      Chloe Jones answered on 10 Jan 2022:

      Travel definitely helps to spread new variants but vaccination is the most important thing! We’re lucky that in this country, people are getting vaccinated but to get rid of COVID worldwide, vaccines need to be available to everyone.

    • Photo: Amy Mason

      Amy Mason answered on 10 Jan 2022:

      No, because it would still spread within those countries.

      And there is no way to avoid damaging the economy if people can’t come in and out – who would bring in the food etc?

      Lockdowns can’t stop covid spreading forever – what they can do is slow it down in the short term so that hospitals can cope better. It is much easier to manage 10 patients a day for 10 days, rather than 100 patients in 1 day.

    • Photo: Holly Kerr

      Holly Kerr answered on 10 Jan 2022:

      This is a great question Lowenna, and one that scientists and politicians in government have been wondering too! We can see that for most countries this hasn’t worked- restricting travel at this stage will not stop the virus spreading in communities within countries. And, like you mentioned, even if it did stop the virus spreading, the damage on the economy would be too great. Luckily we have vacccines that are highly effective at preventing people getting severely sick from COVID. As other scientists have mentioned, we need to prioritise making these available in a more equal way to everyone in every country around the world.

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