That might have worked on January 1st.
Travel restrictions are not to stop it, but to slow it down.
We HAVE to use measures to slow it down or our healthcare is going to be overwhelmed in a few weeks. We will have enough cases now to possibly overwhelm the system, without adding 10000s of imported cases.
see upthread for my post re: an interview with the Brit national - he was hospitalized in late Nov after over a week of feeling crappy. He didn’t interview until last week. So shutting down Jan 1 probably wouldn’t improved things much. China knew what they had, but we sure didn’t. All we knew was Nov we had 1.8/100K hospital admissions for flu/pneumonia, Dec we had 1.9/100K, and Jan we ballooned to 48/100K - from a mild flu season to a harsh increase.