Social distancing and sanitary practices are hugely important for this.
It's not clear to me that large-scale travel bans are particularly helpful. A travel ban is about containment — keeping the number of cases in a region at absolute zero. Social distancing and other local behavior changes are about lowering the rate of infection and slowing the spread of disease in an area where it exists.
The latter is clearly important because it lowers the number of people who simultaneously need medical services in any particular area. A travel ban can help that if successful and it medical resources are easily shunted from a region with zero infections to a region that has them.
But once you've got a single patient zero in a region, the travel ban is fairly close to pointless. The disease is going to start spreading locally anyway.
At the same time, the economic effects of a travel ban do affect the daily lives of lots of people. So I think it's reasonable to focus mostly on local measures and slowing the spread.
It's not clear to me that large-scale travel bans are particularly helpful. A travel ban is about containment — keeping the number of cases in a region at absolute zero. Social distancing and other local behavior changes are about lowering the rate of infection and slowing the spread of disease in an area where it exists.
The latter is clearly important because it lowers the number of people who simultaneously need medical services in any particular area. A travel ban can help that if successful and it medical resources are easily shunted from a region with zero infections to a region that has them.
But once you've got a single patient zero in a region, the travel ban is fairly close to pointless. The disease is going to start spreading locally anyway.
At the same time, the economic effects of a travel ban do affect the daily lives of lots of people. So I think it's reasonable to focus mostly on local measures and slowing the spread.