What Could Biden’s New International Travel Restrictions Be?

I’m Canadian, currently wintering in Arizona, in a gated “bubble” community with no Covid problems at all. Everyone adheres to the mask and distance protocols, and before entering the US we tested negative. So I don’t understand the other above Canadian views that the US-Can border should be totally closed. Most Canadian snowbirds own properties in the US and have a need to visit them for upkeep and maintenance, we cannot just abandon them. Why have northern border closures at all, when the Southern border is wide open? The new pre-travel testing measures are difficult as it’s impossible to get the proper test and be guaranteed the results within the 3-day period. However, that is a more non-arbitrary measure than just locking it down completely. We won’t have any operating airlines left, they will all be out of business.

Firstly, I definitely welcome if the purely political criterion (citizenship of country X) is replaced by public health criteria (e.g. negative test result). I would hope that lessons learned over the last year would be taken into consideration (e.g. many countries have found out that long quarantine requirements only based on international travel are very costly but not very effective; perhaps shorter quarantine combined with testing is better).

Based on our experience, the main spreading events are parties, regardless whether they takes place abroad, locally, in clubs or in private premises. This makes the extremely difficul to control. That's why some favour easier to control things, such as international travel, although it is very ineffective and causes a large collateral damage.

There's a few problems to address with legislation we are seeing about needing to have a negative test before travel. Let's say you got a covid19 infection and then recovered. It is quite probable you will test as positive weeks/months after you got over the infection.That's because of "viral shedding" . Sure, you wouldn't be infectious, but the test is to show if you have had contact with the virus.

Also, we still don't know if the virus can become latent in the body, not show up as an infection for a while and then show as positive again. Virus have lots of tricks and tend to hang around and mutate.

My understanding is that in USA there isn't much genomic testing done of positve cases, so it is pretty much a situation of , if your test comes back as positive, then you have a big problem to sort out. That's going to happen more and more in the countries where lots of people got covid19.

And you aren't going to be able to travel to places that require a negative test result until you could prove it was an old infection. And that might be really difficult to do in a 2 or 3 day time frame, or even worse at the airport departure before being allowed to board.

I wonder if there is income protection insurance to cover this situation, as it will become an issue as people with historic infections will need to travel for business.

This in awful situation and the entire world is suffering. Although, hilarious how a new administration is going too clamp down while supporting policies that they completely attacked the trump administration for months ago. I’d even say this if it was other way around. But until you have intel on items, keep your mouth shut libel, slander or presumptions. But sadly, that’s USA politics. Again..... I’d even say this if it was reversed by the two individuals. Really does show how ignorant most people are......or not ignorant but, they hear a clip quickly and go with it. Bc they are fighting everyday to just survive and feed / support a family. America goes downhill tmrw. We finally had a president that fought for all classes and all races / ethnicities. Why he got thousands more votes in Miami-Dave and Broward in Florida is one example. We can all agree he needed too tweet less and be more professional. But I’m not sorry, I’d prefer him as a leader because you knew where he stood vs. old school politics of lying straight too face with a smile and doing stuff opposite what you say. And, I am protected by our awesome agents. They deserve a lot more credit than they receive. And they do it without asking anything in return. Truly humbling and special.

Don't be misled by the "vaccine is here and we'll be fine by Friday" rhetoric. The vaccine is available in the USA. Good on ya. Numbers are all over the map but one source today said that 30 million shots have arrived in the US but only 10 million have been injected. Bloomberg's latest vaccine tracker say 14.7 million so far with a daily rate of 770,000. That will still take 454 days and longer if you include the second shot. Then a month before fully effective. So planning foreign travel is probably optimistic for 2021.

But the world in not the US. Canada has stopped vaccinating because we have run out and Pfizer has cut off our supply for a month. After over a month we have only a total of approximately 591,000 total doses administered - less than 1 day worth in the US. The US is at 4.8% while Canada is at 1.4%.

The US is leading the free world in most inoculations under a President everyone seems to forget was accused of doing nothing.

The New President has promised to negate everything that the old guy ever did. So I hope his first act isn't aimed at changing the Covid response. Probably not a bad idea to stop unnecessary international travel for a while because very soon it may be safer to stay home.

What the press doesn't ever want to disclose in the numbers are the percentages of people over age 70 or in very bad health that need severe medical care or die. This virus has a 99.8% full recovery rate without the need for extreme medical intervention. It's just plain fact but the press wants to keep the lazy and dumb down masses in fear because "if it bleeds, it leads."

Most elderly or people in poor health aren't actively participating in society. However, not unnoticed the number of old sick folks in wheelchairs that get wheeled down the jet bridge. Shame on most of those families as one place you do not want to be in a medical emergency is at 35,000 feet. But at the end of the day we've as a society have never prevented adults from making decisions that have the potential for bad outcomes-alcohol use, smoking, diet, etc.

But we now live in this wacky world in which Utopian seeking morons believe that somehow by government fiat no one should ever suffer. In doing so we cause even more to suffer. Our politicians are shrills, our press are a bunch of sleazeballs and our people have become dumb down to the max.

Hard to imagine it can be worse than the current situation for international travel. Trust me, as someone who travels to Europe for work, my four trips during the pandemic have been filled with stress trying to manage 72 hour testing windows, quarantines, border crossings within the EU and extra expenses. And now, to hear that vaccine status does nothing to eliminate all the requirements, there seems to be no short term relief.

The current restrictions discourage just about all leisure travel and in spite of prevailing thought that business travelers are the backbone of international air travel, my experience both before and during the pandemic is that business travelers do not constitute a large enough group to keep it going.

In the next six months, I don’t see much changing but at some point countries will have to decide on trade offs between public health concerns and their respective economies, the USA included.

I think the effects of travel bans can be much more complex than one's intuition suggests. For instance, it's v likely travellers eat out more than non-travellers (-> more contacts). Also, it's likely they use public transport such as airport shuttles, Ubers, and subways more than non-travellers (-> more contacts) whereas non-travellers use their own car more frequently.

But more contacts imply a higher R. And the R is all that matters until we are much further with the vaccinations. Especially with the new variants that are believed to have an R one-and-a-half as big as the old variants.

I agree with you, Ben, that testing--particularly double-testing--is helpful. I'm just saying the interaction between measures such as entry restrictions and people's behavior is multifaceted. And if travellers are indeed a lot more mobile and have more contacts than other people, a test or two may not be good enough.

The variants are already in the US, and if we're really concerned about them (which we should be, but seemingly aren't) then we should make more of an effort to do genetic testing on positive tests like the UK does, which is how they discovered they had a more contagious variant in the first place. They were then able to implement a nationally coordinated lockdown, another thing the US can't do. I'm normally a fan of baby steps, to at least get something done right away, but you can't just take one baby step then stop. I hoped that Biden would at least talk about implementing something useful instead of just doubling down on Trump's viral theater and putting some symbolic lights up during the inauguration.

vaccination or not, after a year, why, at least industrial/advanced countries can't figure out how to test travelers for viruses at airports pre departing and stop this nonsense of no travel. All the excuses, the volume of travelers, shortage of testing chemicals, etc is BS after year. Just the US spent an enormous amount that is in billions, spent on technology, building space, manpower, lost time etc spent on security for a theatrical show. Can't figure out how to test for the virus ? com'on

Regardless of what they implement it will be short lived. I would imagine 30 days of banning all non-essential international travel to simply allow for more vaccines to be distributed and cases to drop in the U.S. This to get us to a point where things are a bit more under control. From there I imagine an EU model in that bans will be lifted for some countries that meet certain criteria in cases and vaccination distribution.

With that, the end game may be implementing a proof of vaccination passport to enter the U.S. after 30 days from the traveller receiving the second shot. Which I am all for.