The requirement that vaccinated travelers test negative before flying to the U. S. is medically outdated and economically harmful.
The requirement that vaccinated travelers test negative before flying to the U. S. is medically outdated and economically harmful.
L ast month, I returned from my first trip to Europe in more than two years, and I can report that international travel and the face-to-face trade in ideas is bouncing back.
But not completely. At the Oslo Freedom Forum, a respected human-rights conference that features opponents of dictatorships from around the world, there were fewer Americans than in previous years. I asked Thor Halvorssen, the chairman of the conference, why that might be. “Some people are nervous that if you come to another country and catch Covid, they will be quarantined and separated from family and colleagues,” he said.
All over the world, countries such as Australia, Italy, Austria, and Britain that until recently had far more Covid restrictions than the U.S. have opened up. But the exception is the United States, which still requires a negative Covid test before entering the country. The Biden White House is insisting on keeping the rule that all vaccinated international travelers take a coronavirus test within 24 hours of flying to the United States.
Airlines for America, which represents major U.S. air carriers, is begging the Biden officials to drop the stubborn insistence on tests. “The only impact the pre-departure testing requirement is having is a chilling effect on an already fragile economy here in the U.S.,” they said in a statement May 31, pointing out in addition that many of the tests that travelers take are of mediocre quality or result in many false positives.
The American Society of Travel Agents flatly stated that the pre-departure test is “the single biggest barrier” to travel’s recovery.
“It is much harder for Americans to take a trip abroad,” Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, recently wrote at Bloomberg. “There is always the risk that they will have to spend an extra week (or more) away from home. . . . That also makes it harder to set up conferences or group events.”
The testing rule has clearly had an effect on international travel, which is still down 14 percent from pre-pandemic levels.
“The ongoing requirement to get a negative COVID-19 test in order to fly back home from abroad has clearly spooked many travelers,” Erica Kamrowski, of Thrifty Traveler, said Friday.
Since the Biden administration remains stubborn on the issue — it had to be forced by a federal judge to end the mask mandate for passengers on planes, trains, and buses — some analysts are suggesting ways to at least make the test mandate more manageable.
Representative Lou Correa (D., Calif.) has asked the White House to exempt fully vaccinated inbound travelers from having to provide proof of a negative test. Many experts note that the rule requiring a test 24 hours in advance of any flight was imposed by Biden only in December 2021, replacing a testing requirement of 72 hours in advance. Returning to the old timeframe could convince many people to travel.
Many medical experts agree that the current testing regime is outdated. Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, is incredulous at the outdated attempt to block Covid from entering the country. “We’ve got plenty of Covid here!” he told CNN.
Ending the Covid testing wall — as almost all other advanced countries have done — would put an end to a last vestige of the “hygiene theater.” And, as economist Cowen says, “it would send a signal that America is welcoming the world once again.”