Well, if all travel were banned between states or whatever municipalities may be called in our various locales, where would our food come from? How would PPE's get delivered? How would we get our soap-making supplies? How would hand sanitizer end up in the hands of those who need them? Who would repair essential equipment when it breaks down? There is so much done that is totally dependent on interstate & international travel, to assume that we can just close the roads to all traffic is naive. And our Congressfolk have to travel to do the business of running our democracy, in fact, so shutting down the airports would halt that process as well.
And how would people who have to return home get back home? Or people that have to move to find a new place to live (for whatever reason), how will they get there if they can't travel to their new home? Not everyone started in a place where they can actually stay indefinitely when this pandemic hit or when a new wave hit, either.
Anyway, I do agree that reasonable travel restrictions are necessary and that unnecessary travel should be avoided. But people are going to do what they are going to do and it cannot all be prevented even with the most stringent policies in place.
So I just got back from moving my son 2100 miles across country. He had to move. He could not do it on his own. I had to go back there to help him. It was the only way to make it happen safely and to ensure he would not end up stranded somewhere along the way. In fact, if I had not been there, he may well have ended up in a psych ward, jail, stranded in a snow storm in Colorado, or dead. Any of those things were an absolutely real possibility given his circumstances. And his dog would have suffered as well, and would also have ended up stranded who knows where had any of those things happened. So I did the right thing by my son, his dog and my conscience. I rented a vehicle and drove out to get him and we caravaned as far as over the mountain range in Colorado until his car gave out, then I rented a storage unit for some of his stuff and drove him & his dog the rest of the way here so he would have a safe place to live. Tomorrow my husband is driving to Colorado to get his stuff from storage and bringing it back here. I was going to do that myself, but he volunteered to take on that burden and give me a few extra days of much needed rest, for which I am extremely grateful. He's a good man. And my son is close-by now and I can better keep track of his welfare, even though he is an adult and I wish he could manage it all by himself.
There are so many people in the world who cannot make it on their own without the help of others, and travel is sometimes a necessary part of providing that help. So I am against the idea of absolute travel bans. They make no sense unless as a society we also endorse starvation and isolation to the detriment of life.
In the course of my travels to and from my son's home, I adhered to strict CoVid precautions, more so than some state residents in all the states I drove through, both at gas stations (had to use the restrooms) and in hotels (couldn't sleep in the car in the dead of winter in any of said states). The only places that seemed to adhere to CoVid precautions diligently were in places where it's a National Corporate policy and even then some simply chose to ignore the posted signage. These were not travelers, but local people with local license plates on their cars; so if they get CoVid, they have only themselves to blame, not this traveler. I rarely saw anyone with out-of-state plates get out of their cars or semis without a mask at a truck stop in any of the states where I refilled the gas tank. And none of them walked into a C-store without a mask from those out-of-state plated vehicles.