I think the argument was made that banning travel from China at the time wasn't effective because travel from Europe had not been banned.
There wasn't that much time between the travel bans, and a lot of people didn't want either of those travel bans at all. That wasn't the only argument being made (go look at manly, he's arguing that travel bans were useless anyway).
In any case, trying to prevent catastrophe here by banning travel without preparing for the inevitable outbreaks here was a humongous blunder.
I mean, I guess? What exactly was anyone supposed to do? The CDC has been in decline over several administrations. We completely botched Zika (and got lucky). About the only "good" disease response we've had have been against livestock diseases, and that meant slaughtering tons of livestock. Which um. Was actually very bad.
The food banks should be calling them up and offering logistics to pick it up.
Just because a farmer exists with tons of useful crops, doesn't mean they have the logistics to deliver it to a useful place.
That's a lovely thought, but I don't think the food banks have that kind of money either.
American farmers chronically overproduce. School meal programs, food stamps, and similar semi-subsidies help keep production high without tanking ag prices. You can really trace this mentality back to Thomas Jefferson who didn't want us to wind up dependent on too many foreign food sources.