François Lenglet is a French journalist who specializes in economic issues. In the following clip from a TV talk show, he discusses the absurdity of putting everyone in the country into quarantine while maintaining an open-borders policy.
Many thanks to MissPiggy for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Video transcript:
00:00 | We delayed closing the borders for ideological reasons. | |
00:04 | It’s absurd, because, excuse me. —We had to be pragmatic. | |
00:09 | A quarantine, what is it? It’s like a border. So each one of us | |
00:12 | is in his own little republic. We’re not allowed to go out, | |
00:15 | so we don’t contaminate others and so we won’t be exposed. That’s the definition of a border. | |
00:20 | Why is it good to have a border at your home but not around a country? Honestly, I have to say it. | |
00:25 | So there’s an ideology that’s criticizable. | |
00:30 | We’ve closed the borders, but just around each one of us. | |
00:37 | Around the countries most contaminated. That’s great for other countries. They all must have | |
00:41 | thanked us. We should have closed the borders from the beginning. | |
00:45 | Oh, I know that’s easy to say now, me being a journalist; giving advice | |
00:50 | is much easier compared to someone who actually has to make the decisions. But retrospectively, | |
00:53 | when we saw the match that was played, with Turin. —Lyon-Turin. | |
00:58 | Lyon-Turin, yes, well of course we should overreact. | |
01:05 | They tell us, “The virus doesn’t respect borders!” Excuse me? | |
01:08 | The virus doesn’t travel by foot, but in people, in whom it travels across borders! | |
01:12 | If you block the people, the virus is blocked as well! I mean, of course I’m not a virologist, | |
01:16 | but it’s common sense. So here, I think that | |
01:19 | the ideology concerning borders has become detrimental. |
As of yesterday, Germany’s borders were still open, with regular flights to Frankfurt from Iran and China. Yesterday’s flight from Tehran was 23 minutes early:
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/IRA721/history/20200401/0250Z/OIIE/EDDF
Late yesterday, Germany *finally* banned flights from Iran, according to health minister, Jens Spahn. Horse, stable door, in the next country.
If you want to fly in from China, you are apparently still good to go:
https://flightaware.com/live/findflight?origin=pek&destination=EDDF
Question is, are the passengers being quarantined?
Doesn’t really matter if the German authorities are still allowing orcs to claim asylum without being impeded. At this point a few more Chinese Virus infected orcs will not make much of a difference except in killing off a few more elderly drains on the German pension and health system.
The passengers are given an info sheet and asked to write down their expected whereabouts for the next 30(?) days to aid contact tracing. The forms are then collected and stored. That is it. The free movement of people is inviolable!
It’s so sensible it’s mind-boggling that it’s controversial.