The US President, Donald Trump only ordered a ban on entry of non-American citizens from China on the 2nd of February, excluding countries like Hong Kong and Macau. 

Despite the imposed ban, around 40,000 Amercians from China returned to their native country. With this, the number of people who entered America was at 4,30,000 in the initial period of the outbreak. 

Thousands of these people came from Wuhan, which was the epicenter of this virus. Considering that coronavirus is highly contagious and can infect upto 2 healthy people, the virus spread within America like wildfire and in no time, it has now become the epicenter itself.

The New York Times report pointed out that only passengers who were coming directly from Wuhan were screened and only at three airports including, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

By then, around 4,000 people had already entered the USA directly from Wuhan. The passenger data from China into America revealed that there were more than 1,300 flights from China to the USA in January and even after the travel restrictions, there were 279 flights that flew from China into the USA with most of them being operated by Chinese Airlines.   

And that’s not it. The Screening process was also said to be quite sketchy. Passengers were only asked questions about their travel history and there wasn’t any mandatory check up of health or temperature to see if the person had any symptoms of the virus.

People were advised to self quarantine at home but there was no follow up after that to keep track of the passengers once they left the airport.  

Now if we look at the numbers in America right now, it has the highest number of confirmed cases which is standing at 3.37 lakh with over 9,600 deaths. The White House has also projected that the death toll eventually will be somewhere around 2.4 lakh.

But the real number may actually be a lot higher as only people who test positive for coronavirus are counted in the official figure and not those who die without any form of testing.

Hence, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesperson says that even the estimation is an underestimate.