Thread by @tomaspueyo

Don't open your borders to tourists w/o quarantine yet!
If you must, do it intelligently.

Countries like Spain are opening to ALL tourists from the EU, without a quarantine. This is crazy. It's going to lay to waste all the hard work done. (Thread) [1/

rtve.es/noticias/20200…

Singapore was dancing really well for months. Then it seeded some cases from abroad. And the caseload exploded.

Can you see these blue cases below? That is the seeds. And they were the cause of the outbreak afterwards.
[2/11]

The same thing has happened in Argentina. These blue cases early on caused all the cases afterwards. [3/11]

Now, Spain is not just opening up to the countries that are safest, such as Austria or the Baltic. They are opening up to all countries, including Sweden and the UK, which still have a heavy amount of cases, or Germany and France, which are growing. [4/11]

The worst part is the excuse to open up to UK residents: Their second residence in Spain. If you come to live in Spain, you can quarantine two weeks at home. [5/11]

Let's do back-of-the-envelope math. The UK has had ~20k official cases in the last 2 weeks. Let's assume they catch 20% of cases. That means 100k active cases, or 0.15% of the population. There were 18M British tourists in Spain last year. [6/11]
statista.com/statistics/447….

0.15% of 18M is 27k, or ~500 cases/week
Even assuming sick ppl travel less, you still get hundreds of infections a week. That's exactly what caused the Argentinian outbreak from above. And that's just the Brits. Add the Swedes, other countries... [7/11]

The government says they have measures to stop this. What measures? An interrogation and temperature check. [8/11]
rtve.es/noticias/20200…

The interrogation, as you can assume, won't be very useful since there's a strong incentive to lie.

The temp check as 2 big issues:
1. You don't show symptoms until you reach peak infectiousness.
2. Lots of false negatives
[9/11]
medium.com/@tomaspueyo/co…

The Spanish government is including the Brits "hoping for reciprocity", instead of demanding it. I really want to believe that would happen. Knowing @BorisJohnson , do we really think hope is the way to negotiate? [10/11]

Spain depends on tourism. We must reopen during summer. But there are better ways.
1. For travelers from the UK and Sweden, require a quarantine. They have the most cases per capita in Europe.
2. Require a PCR test for everybody coming in, and 4d later.
[11/11]