In an interview with Breitbart News on Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) said the Trump administration should consider banning all “non-essential travel” from China into the United States given the risks associated with the ongoing coronavirus outbreak in the one-party state.
“Persons infected with coronavirus can transmit it before it [they] are symptomatic, which is very dangerous from an epidemiological standpoint,” said Cotton. Non-symptomatic carriers of the coronavirus would be unidentifiable as threats via screening mechanisms protocols to filter infected persons in the context of international travel.
Cotton determined, “I believe the administration should begin to plan for the prospect of having to suspend all non-essential travel from China to the United States.”
The coronavirus could be contagious for up to two weeks before a patient becomes symptomatic, warned a Chinese health official on Sunday.
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Cotton added, “We and the Europeans should be asking the Chinese government to allow us to send our experts into Wuhan so we can try to get to the bottom of this to help identify and [develop] a vaccine that will protect our people, and frankly, protect China from having a pandemic.”
“It would appear that the origin story about this starting in a fish in Wuhan is not correct, as one epidemiologist said, ‘That virus went into the fish market before it came out of the fish market,'” stated Cotton, referring to an estimation of Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University.
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