Blue City/State

That is surprising considering what we are experiencing. I understood India to be experiencing a major spike in cases.

Steve, Delhi is a recognized international"hotspot" re the pandemic. I agree but I had a friend on the flight. Makes you wonder what the leaders of New York and New York City have as an agenda.

This might or might not seem important, Carl; but neither New York City nor New York State have the authority to do anything about deplaning passengers. Airport Security is the sole bailiwick of the TSA. The chain of command would lead to Donald Trump. If you feel the lax procedures indicate some hidden agenda....

I don't really see a conspiracy here. I would attribute the disregard for common sense to pervasive incompetence.

However, there is a certain irony to your fear of people coming from India. I have been working on a business project with a colleague in India for the past month. We both miss some sleep because our days don't overlap very well. He could come here, but he is not about to leave India to come to the US. He feels ten times safer there. India has an aggressive program of targeted testing, contact tracing, and enforced quarantine. Despite the unimaginable population density,the massive slums, a months earlier onset, and 3 times our population, India was showing less than 4,000 deaths up thru may 20. Undoubtedly this is way understated, as it is in every country (particularly the US where our new strategy seems to be to try and cover up the cost of our inept response). The world watches in a sort of horrified fascination as what was formerly a shining example and the world's leader blunders along with catastrophic incompetence and a response barely worthy of a third world country. It is travelers from the US that no one wants to see.

Well the blog monitor is at it again. This time he has outdone himself on the intelligence scale. He states, “…neither New York City nor New York State have the authority to do anything about deplaning passengers. Airport Security is the sole bailiwick of the TSA.” Amazing! Anyone with walking around sense knows the TSA monitors and regulates only passengers seeking to board aircraft. I would defy anyone to show anywhere a TSA check point for any deplaning passengers. GC would have you believe any airport, although likely owned by a non-federal government entity, has no right, authority nor responsibility for security re any passenger’s safety. Amazing. He infers this is the sole responsibility of one Donald Trump. What a pitiful display of his contempt for the intelligence of the US citizenry and a blatant attempt to further his warped liberal agenda.

Further he displays his self-diagnosed omnipotence by emphatically stating I have a “fear of people coming from India.”! He further states he knows the feelings of the 1.2+ billion people on the entire sub-continent of India! All this coming from “a colleague in India.” This, again, is an oft used mechanism of the intellectually infirm. It is called anecdotal information whereby one takes a statically insignificant “story” and represents it to be indicative of the truth in every case. Such support for an argument is not in any sense an indication of the veracity of the purveyor of such an argument. The scientific support for an argument is the more statistically significant use of empirical data or academically derived data which will withstand peer review by those learned in the field.

Surprisingly, GC accepts official numbers published by perhaps the most corrupt Country in the world. Imagine a Country proposing to be a Representative Democracy yet maintains and enforces a caste system! Oxymoron personified by definition! Then, in finishing, he exposes his Obamaite propensities by espousing the Obama world view we are just another country, the old ugly duckling argument, further stating, “It is travelers from the US that no one wants to see.” Interesting when demonstratively millions upon millions of people from around the world would come to the US tomorrow if they could.

Carl; The City and State have no authority over the airport. Outgoing passengers are cleared by TSA, who controls the area where both departing and incoming passengers pass. In the case of international flights, you are not released into the airport until you have been funneled thru customs along with every other incoming passenger from international flights.Several hundred passengers did not come into the country with no checks whatsoever. They had to pass thru customs. Now, I have never given any thought to whether the personnel who funnel us through to customs are TSA or Customs, I suppose I assumed they were TSA, since they were in the same uniforms. The ones who check your passport and clear you to leave into the general airport are customs. I am quite familiar with the procedures at airports. The last few years, I have been spending half my time overseas. That was the schedule for this year until January 23. I was in London when China shut down Wuhan, which was adequate warning for me to come straight home and stay here.

While I referenced the colleague I have been working on a project with, I have a number of colleagues in India, as I have been helping with several projects there, until this recent mess has brought most of them to a halt. Trust me Carl, people in India are not dying to come to the US right now. No One is. The magnitude of our failure to deal with Covid is apparent to the world. We had people coming over here from 20 something countries this year. All of them, 100%, have cancelled. Right now we are operating like a third world country.