US expands travel ban to Brazil, poised to cross 100,000 toll

The travel ban goes into effect from Friday and applies to immigrants and non-immigrants from Brazil, same as earlier orders suspending travelers from China, Iran, the Schengen area, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The Trump administration on Sunday suspended the entry of travelers from Brazil citing widespread human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus there and the threat infected individuals from there pose to the United States, which is staring at the grimmest of Covid-19 records of 100,000 deaths.

The travel ban goes into effect from Friday and applies to immigrants and non-immigrants from Brazil, same as earlier orders suspending travelers from China, Iran, the Schengen area, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Citing the World Health Organization, which the United States has threatened to defund if it does not fix its China skew, the White House said in an official proclamation Brazil is currently number three in the world in number of infections — at 310,087 (it’s No 2 at 363,211, according to the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 tracker, behind only the United States).

The potential of infected people from Brazil entering the United States undetected, President Donald Trump said in the proclamation issued under his name and seal, “threatens the security of our transportation system and infrastructure and the national security”.

Trump has touted his ban on travel from China, effective February 2, as the lynchpin of his administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, as he continues to be accused of a later a delayed and botched response.

US fatalities from Covid-19 stood Monday morning at 97,722, just shy of the 100,000 mar, up by 633 over the past 24 hours. Infections went up by 20,634 over the same period to 1.66 million.

President Trump, who has called himself a cheerleader for keeping up the spirits of Americans during these times of despair and despondency with his optimism, tried to focus on the positives. “Cases, numbers and deaths are going down all over the Country!” he wrote on twitter Sunday morning, which is true, but so is the eventuality of the US crossing 100,000, accounting for a third of the toll worldwide, which he did not acknowledge.

The US president has sought to shift as much of the blame for the outbreak away from himself and his administration as he can, with an eye on the November elections. He has accused China of being slow to alert the world and threatened to punish the WHO for helping China cover up its alleged mishandling of the epidemic from the start, and downplaying it.

Robert O’Brien, the US national security adviser, told an NBC TV interviewer Sunday China “unleashed a virus on the world that’s destroyed trillions of dollars in American economic wealth that we’re having to spend to keep our economy alive, to keep Americans afloat during this virus”.

“The cover-up that they did of the virus is going to go down in history, along with Chernobyl,” he added, referring to the world’s worst nuclear disaster yet at a nuclear plant in erstwhile Soviet Union’s Ukraine in 1986. Moscow is alleged to have covered up the exact extent of the devastation.