Only if ALL the early arrivals were caught and tightly quarantined AND all of their contacts in the US traced and strictly quarantined AND all of their contacts, etc.
The first guy from China who brought the disease into Snohomish County was well when he got off the plane, but fell ill five day later. The asymptomatic contagion makes contact tracing almost impossible.
It might have delayed the onset of rapid growth, the the exponential growth phase would have occurred no matter what.
Apple and Google are developing a solution using cell phones to do anonymous contact tracing. You would get a alert that you have been exposed to a COVID patient. But it is going to really raise the hackles on people who value privacy.
Wouldn’t the exponential phase have started from a smaller base had this been taken seriously earlier?
Hasn’t the failure to test like other countries have managed to been a significant screwup?
Didn’t the president, based on his remarks in January and February, seem to think it would not be a big deal here?
Against these claims one can argue (and I assume some Freepers would) we should’ve taken a Swedish attitude from the beginning and maybe paid almost the same price in terms of sickness and death without so much economic disruption. but I think it’s hard to argue that the president gave this epidemic the importance it turns out to have deserved until rather late in the game.
It’s true that many screwups were by people in the CDC and TSA. (Think about those long lines at the airport after the announcement that entry from Europe would be banned.) But the president is the chief executive, literally. Screwups on his watch in the executive branch are his screwups. I fear that had Obama or Clinton had the sequence of decisions Trump has, Freepers would be outraged. It’s true he banned much travel from China when most leaders around the world weren’t, but that’s only one step, taken after the virus was already ensconced in the country.
If you think he was incapable of doing anything to make the epidemic less severe from the first time US intelligence noticed there was a problem, perhaps in late December or early January, then nothing more I say can persuade you that the president is not pristinely without blame, and that he screwed up before March. I think he could have done better, and his supporters have a right to feel disappointed in his initial lack of seriousness. Yes, that’s hindsight, but he’s the president, with a huge intelligence and contagious-disease bureaucracy, for goodness sakes.
If it turns out that he asked these people early (from early January, when the news that something weird was going on was capable of being widely known) and often whether the disease might be a serious problem for the US, and was advised not to worry, it’s nothing, I will retract everything I have said here. But I don’t think he did.
It is now too late for contact tracing in much of the USA.