Countries may gain time in the short-term as they limit travel to fight the new coronavirus pandemic, but the World Health Organization thinks overall that “it doesn’t help to restrict movement,” a top adviser to the U.N. health agency’s chief said Thursday. Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led a WHO team in China during the raging COVID-19 outbreak there last month, said in an interview that travel bans “generally aren’t part of the armamentarium you bring to bear on something like this.” “What we found, as a general principle – not a general principle, a pretty robust principle – is that it doesn’t help to to restrict movement,” Aylward, a former WHO emergencies chief, said outside a room at agency headquarters devoted to the outbreak.
