America’s COVID-19 Air Travel Rules Are Insane

The White House clings to disruptive travel policies designed for a COVID world that no longer exists.

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If you want to see how warped the current U.S. COVID-19 travel restrictions are, consider this: in 2019, there were 15.4 million air passenger arrivals from Mexico, almost 7 times the number from Italy. Today, despite Mexican COVID-19 prevalence being higher than in Italy, Delta variant cases permeating both countries, and Italy having administered well over double the number of Mexico’s vaccinations per 100 people, entry for non-Americans from Italy to the U.S. is banned, but people can fly in from Mexico irrespective of their vaccination status.

Despite months of clarity that the current COVID-19 U.S. air travel passenger rules defy basic logic, though, the White House remains stubbornly unmoved. “Given where we are … with the Delta variant,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, “we will maintain existing travel restrictions.” There was no acknowledgement of the incoherence of the current orders in terms of the countries they apply to, the people they apply to, or the changing context of COVID-19 in a world of vaccinations, let alone the dreadful impact of the rules on families and the economy.

Since last spring, the U.S. international border has generally prohibited entry for those who have been in the Schengen EU travel zone (the EU’s passport free countries), the U.K., Ireland, Iran and China within the previous 14 days. India, South Africa and Brazil were added to the restricted list during their respective outbreaks. Briefly scrapped by President Donald Trump in the dying days of his presidency, all bans were reinstated when Joe Biden took office.

Not that the rules apply to everyone. American citizens, permanent residents, dependents, spouses, children and certain student visa holders or permanent visa applicants are exempt. But nonimmigrant U.S. work visa holders and non-American visitors to the U.S. are not. The virus is discerning by nationality, apparently, although one requirement isn’t: all air entrants from foreign countries must have evidence of a negative COVID-19 test result within 3 days of entry.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Jason Gibson

    Good writing

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  2. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    The current rules make absolutely no sense. At least American citizens can come back in (my sister and her friends flew back from Spain this past week). But it’s not fair for everyone else (a friend of ours cannot see his family in Spain and hasn’t now since before COVID). Another friend can finally visit his relatives in Canada but they can’t come visit him. Like our immigration rules, these restrictions make no sense. They do not solve the problem they are designed to solve and they don’t help.

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    Rajeev

    It's not the White House's fault that the pandemic isn't under control. Foreign visitors with potential Covid would be a hell of a lot easier to deal with if our country was vaccinated and we had such little Covid. Then we could be relaxed on entry because our domestic population would be at less risk. I feel as though they've done everything possible to try and reach all the unvaccinated but we just are gonna have to live in a world that tolerates Covid for no reason. Estimates are we could spend 50 billion dollars to vaccinate most of the world. Wouldn't it be great if we did that? We already spend a lot of money on aid that doesn't have nearly the bang for the buck.

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  4. CatoTheElder

    This sort of thing is kept in a mental file by those who routinely argue against the government doing [fill in blank with just about anything] because of their clear and utter incompetence, as seen by….[fill in blank with this, or $700 toilet seats, or whatever]. And it’s hard to blame ‘em. There’s really no excuse for this kind of laziness, incompetence, or whatever it is.

    Personally, I blame the filibuster.

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    rlritt

    No matter what anyone does its going to be wrong. When it comes to Covid, citizens, non citizens legal or illegal residence can bring the disease with them. They counterfeit vaccination certificates and sell the on the internet. They can do the same with test results. It's all a scam. How is Biden or any lawmaker of either party going to stop it.

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    Adam Bridge

    I flew to Hawai'i yesterday. We had to log into the Hawai'i safe travels site and send in validation of our vaccination status OR a negative COVID test within 72 hours of the flight. Then I had to show that information at the gate well before the flight so I could get on the plane. It's not rocket surgery. California is creating a verified on-line vaccination site. It isn't perfect but it's getting there.

    I flew with my vaccination card in the same plastic sleeve as my international vaccination card - the yellow one.

    I don't get the civil liberties garbage. Driver's license, passport, vaccination/immunization proof. Geesh. Protect yourself and others!

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  7. Alex DeLarge

    Who cares about flight restrictions. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world - infected with anything and everything - are just walking over the Southern border.

    Everything about the official response to covid has been dishonest, incompetent, and irrational from the git-go. Why anyone considers these clowns to be credible at this point is a mystery.

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      rlritt

      They are mostly being detained. However, in fact 30% of people in detention centers are refusing to be vaccinated. Border agents apprehended over 180,000 people in June. This appears to be due to political upheaval and drug related crime in Central America. They would rather be in detention centers than in their in countries. This isn't just a crisis here. Most people in over crowded 3rd world countries want to get out to anyplace. And with Covid it's a horrible mess.

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      1. DrGeo

        The busiest border crossing in the world is San Ysidro, CA (near San Diego) and Tijuana, with 60-90k people crossing daily. There are no real checks traveling both ways across the border, even though officially restrictions are in place in both countries. I cross at least weekly and often 3 to 5 times each week and have not once been screened to asked about COVID symptoms.

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          rlritt

          I'm assuming you are an American with a passport or ID? Why would they detain you? Especially at San Diego, which has hour long waits to cross. They are detaining people who cross illegally.

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          1. DrGeo

            My point was that the undocumented or illegal border crossings are far outnumbered by those crossing legally every day. Mexico had initially said they were going to halt crossings similar to they way Canada had closed their border, but it never happened. And, with a Sentri pass... the usual wait is 15-30 minutes. If I had to wait in the regular passport line... oh, my! :)

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    DrBlud

    The travel policy re:SARS-CoV-2 is incoherent and needlessly restrictive. COVID-19 is now endemic throughout the world with the exception of some islands and an island continent. Other than a policy to protect the individuals on the plane from transmission... none of these things make any epidemiologic or scientific sense.

    I don't understand vaccine passports as a concept other than as a method of institutional coercion. If I am vaccinated, why must I coerce others.

    My view is this though is from the lens of someone that believes COVID-19 is now an endemic disease with numerous natural reservoirs, similar to the Spanish Influenza. Viruses adapt and most frequently become less virulent and easier to spread. It's the best way for them to keep their DNA in circulation (mild and contagious is better for the virus than lethal). We know it happened with the Spanish flu which gave rise to the predominant circulating strains now in existence, and we expect that something similar happened with the other coronaviruses that are endemic in the US population. I'm ready to move on and treat this just like we do any other virus. Encourage vaccination, don't go to work when sick, wash your hands... I might add wear a mask when sick. But that is all.

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    George.Skinner

    You know what would enable smarter entry rules? Vaccine passports providing secure proof of who’s been vaccinated. Those little paper cards aren’t secure and could easily be faked. This problem gets worse when you’re screening visitors from all over the world and have no basis of judging whether that card really looks like something that could’ve been issued in Hyderabad, Foshan, or Grenoble. There’s a reason that a system of passports and visas evolved for regular travel, and it’s probably time to expand it to include medical status.

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    1. CatoTheElder

      I agree. It would be good to simply put vaccination status in the same database as national passports, with linkage thereto, so that it’s easy to check using scans of passports. Sure, it would be a big project, but I am certain it’s doable, given the will to see it get done.

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      rlritt

      What a colossal chore that would be.

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      Cogitatio

      I am not sure the vaccine passports are a viable solution at this point. For all of us that are already vaccinated, what is the incontrovertible proof that would be used to generate the passport? With more than 160 million Americans already vaccinated, how in the world would we be able to implement such a thing?

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      1. Shaybult

        It's not like the vaccine card they give you at the injection site is the only record. Every state (I believe) has a database of who has been vaccinated.

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        Pat Riot

        As I mentioned below, in this case 95% is good enough. That little piece of paper they gave you is easily forged, but a forgery could land you in prison for five years and not a lot of people would want that hanging over their head no matter how easy it was.

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          rlritt

          You can buy those slips of paper on the internet.

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            Pat Riot

            And you could go to prison for using them. Would *you* risk it?

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        George.Skinner

        First, this is the kind of thing that we might expect competent government to have put in place sometime in the months after the initial COVID wave subsided, vaccines were undergoing trials, and it was still months before a vaccination campaign would being.
        Second, I suspect that the records already exist - they're just not tied together in some coherent way. For example, Texas has a state immunization record program and database. What's needed is an overarching federal system that can verify immunization status with a traceable document. The challenge is that governments are usually terrible at big IT projects. One of the things Trump did right was simply provide funding or purchase guarantees to pharma companies to get a vaccine done. Too bad his administration didn't do something similar to fix problems with health information access exposed during COVID. I'm sure American tech leaders like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon could've risen to the challenge.

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          Pat Riot

          I've worked in large companies that people from the outside would consider very competent and forward-thinking and well-run. From that experience I can tell you that putting together an IT project of that scale simply couldn't happen overnight. There are a million details to work out and lots of, "nine women can't product one baby in one month" sort of scheduling issues. You'd have to train hundreds of thousands of workers, for instance (just to name one of a hundred issues we haven't thought it).

          And yes, the government is even worse at it, but that's usually because their projects are bigger in scale, which *inevitably* makes it take longer...

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            George.Skinner

            I've been involved in a couple and they're incredibly hard to pull off. What tends to screw up the government projects is that they mess up the requirements phase, usually due to inexperience on the part of their managers. Then there's the usual thicket of regulations and bureaucracy that dogs any government program. Not the sort of thing you pull off overnight, but such things never happen at all if you never start them or even identify the need to start them.

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      Pat Riot

      This.

      I would add this: if you come to the US from another country and you aren't vaxxed, we give you a free vax when you enter and you quarantine during the period it takes the doses to take effect.

      As for the issue of fraud, that's certainly a problem but this is a situation where if we stop 95% of people then it's good enough. Lots of people might commit fraud but most people wouldn't risk a prison sentence over it.

      I agree about changing passports and the like but all of that stuff takes a lot of time to implement.

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    5. Rational

      There is longstanding precedent for this. It is still necessary for a traveler to many countries to carry a “yellow card” for entry showing that he or she is vaccinated against Yellow Fever. There is no reason we could not handle this in the same manner other than governmental inertia.

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        George.Skinner

        Exactly. The current issue is symptomatic of public health authorities and governments failing to think ahead. I can understand a preoccupation with immediate issues in the first few months of the pandemic, but by last summer people should’ve been thinking about what comes next and developing plans. This isn’t exclusively an American problem either - the same issue is found in Europe and Canada.

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  10. Rational

    Aren’t some of these restrictions a function of reciprocity? That is, U.S. citizens are currently barred by the EU countries from entering several countries in the Schengen area, so we are doing the same in return? At this point, it probably makes sense for all countries to rethink entry requirements, but I am in favor of having reciprocity.

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    1. Shaybult

      We're definitely not prioritizing reciprocity. Canada has announced that Americans (vaccinated and with a negative test) can enter their country starting August 9; we said "Nope, we're still not allowing Canadians into the US. We'll reevaluate in September." The UK just announced they'll allow Americans in; the US is till not allowing any Bristish citizens.

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