[brickmort]

In the USA, if travel restrictions hadn't been put in place in late January (going directly against WHO recommendations at the time), the virus would have propagated much quicker into the country and the US would have been in way worse shape today than it is now.

[syrrim]

You don't know that. Italy had early travel restrictions, and had it very bad. Canada had no travel restrictions until much later, and has it better than (parts of) the US. That so many believe the travel restrictions were warranted seems to solely be the product of them having been considered an outsize response at the time, rather than evaluating the arguments against them not qualified on the danger of the pandemic.

In particular, travel restrictions become actively harmful when they reduce the capacity to detect and therefore apply extra scrutiny to those travelling through affected countries. Insofar as people will travel anyways, they only serve to hide that fact from authorities. This of course does not apply to the US, which had no testing capacity at the time. But we can no more suppose that the US would have been worse off as we can suppose they would have been better off.