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I think you're completely off mark here and I will make the strongest version of the argument. People travel less to places when they perceive a danger, even if the danger wasn't presented to them by any policy or authorities. It seems trivially obvious to me that people can be afraid of things based on their own judgment, you seem to disagree. As a rough stand in for "People's unwillingness to go do things during a pandemic" you can look at the sharp decrease of domestic economic activity in Feb/March 2020 before almost any policies were in place. Furthermore cutting out 2020 because "Biden wasn't in charge yet" when 2020 had by far the lowest amount of travel and activity (and Trump was in charge for the entire calendar year), again showing that this activity is not steered entirely by the chilling effect of the government (Remember at this time Trump was saying the risk was really really low, it might miraculously disappear, and that most cases would heal in a day).
The fact that 70-80% of visitors to Las Vegas are domestic strengthens my point even if you don't yet realize it. The dropoff of 10-15% suggests that 50% of all travel from foreign visitors has been curtailed by these chilling effects - much more than even the most generous example you can find of vaccine rules.
You can A/B test this with the similar drop off of tourism to SEA during the 2002 SARS outbreak. The dropoff was about 40% despite no Coronavirus-like restrictions in place. The best I can find are some local quarantine orders in Beijing - who knows if they were followed or enforced - as well as Travel Advisories, the same kind which exist for like 70% of countries but don't have any real effect on travel because nobody cares about some government suggestion, they care about their own judgement and safety.
If you have an argument to make then make it.
The danger was presented to them by policy and authorities because the prevalence of covid is effectively invisible to the average person in the absence of being told about it by authorities. What exactly would someone notice, absent being told, that would inform them that covid was around and uniquely dangerous? Approximately nothing. They'd notice people getting colds, as people always do, and old people dying at a fairly similar rate to what old people died at a decade or two ago, and short of carrying out their own far-reaching statistical survey on death rates they'd have no idea anything was amiss. This is roughly what happened in the Flu pandemics of the 50s and 60s - nobody really cared because there's no particular reason you'd notice an elevated risk.
This is hardly some tourists notice everyone who visits X mysteriously comes back in a body bag and therefore stop visiting X. There really is no danger that a layman would be able to detect were it not for authorities insisting there was a danger.
Not a good way to define it as we have been in a pandemic since some time in the 1980s.
I thought I had explained this clearly enough, but to try to explain this again: The reason I have cut it out is because the initial dispute is that I believe Biden's actions during covid have done more damage to tourism than Trump's actions on immigration. Therefore, including Trump's actions during covid as part of Biden's actions would be unfair to Biden.
No, unless you have evidence that the dropoff is all foreign visitors.
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