US To Require Negative COVID-19 Tests For International Air Passengers (reuters.com) 111
According to Reuters, the CDC is expected to sign an order on Tuesday requiring nearly all international air travelers to test negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of departure. Those under 2 and passengers connecting through the UK are exempt. From the report: The new rules are to take effect two weeks from the day they are signed by CDC Director Mark Redfield, which would be Jan. 26. The CDC has been urgently pressing for an expansion of the requirements with the Trump administration for weeks. One remaining issue is how to address some countries that have limited testing capacity and how the CDC would address travel to those countries, the sources said.
At a White House meeting on Monday, Redfield again made an urgent case to adopt the testing requirements as new strains of COVID-19 are identified in different parts of the world. He raised concerns that vaccines could potentially not be effective against new strains, sources said. U.S. officials do not plan to drop restrictions that were adopted starting in March that ban most non-U.S. citizens who have been in most of Europe, the United Kingdom and Brazil as soon as possible, the sources said. They added that public health officials are sympathetic to the push to lift the restrictions that apply only to a limited number of countries.
At a White House meeting on Monday, Redfield again made an urgent case to adopt the testing requirements as new strains of COVID-19 are identified in different parts of the world. He raised concerns that vaccines could potentially not be effective against new strains, sources said. U.S. officials do not plan to drop restrictions that were adopted starting in March that ban most non-U.S. citizens who have been in most of Europe, the United Kingdom and Brazil as soon as possible, the sources said. They added that public health officials are sympathetic to the push to lift the restrictions that apply only to a limited number of countries.
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Yes, of course. Most of the rest of the world has not allowed US citizens for many months now due to the high risk of spreading of covid.
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It's not all international passengers, but only the ones coming into the US.
The CDC is a US federal agency; it has ZERO authority outside the US (obvious exception being restricting entry into the country).
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
How has this not been required until now? Jamaica has required this for months.
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How has this not been required until now? Jamaica has required this for months.
Jamaica is apparently more First World.
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Check the stats -- almost all of the "third world" has been doing much, much better than the so-called "first world".
US: 115 deaths / 100,000 people
UK: 125 deaths / 100,000 people
Africa: 5 deaths / 100,000 people
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Check the stats -- almost all of the "third world" has been doing much, much better than the so-called "first world".
US: 115 deaths / 100,000 people UK: 125 deaths / 100,000 people Africa: 5 deaths / 100,000 people
These statistics are somewhat misleading. You combine ALL countries in Africa for a single value for the entire continent whereas you leave the US and UK as countries. Different parts of the world are experiencing different strains of novel coronavirus 19; the strain first discovered in the UK (now also in 3 US states) is particularly virulent. More people visit the UK and the US than African countries; more outside visitors increases risk.
According to the CDC, the US averaged 75 new cases and 1 death per d
Comparing Countries and Continents (Score:2)
Actually, I'd argue that the USA is "close enough" to a continent to compare it to one in many metrics.
Africa in total has ~1.2B people, The USA ~330M. Not even an order of magnitude difference. More importantly, NA in total is 579M people(Mexico 128M, Canada 38M). So we're catching 57% of the population of NA when we look at just the USA.
We could compare directly with Nigeria (~200M), but after that, most African countries would be more comparable to US States, not the USA.
As for combining the USA and
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Actually, I'd argue that the USA is "close enough" to a continent to compare it to one in many metrics.
Africa in total has ~1.2B people, The USA ~330M. Not even an order of magnitude difference.
Perhaps not an order of magnitude difference, but the population of all of Africa is about 4 times that of the US (using the numbers you provided). Africa is about 11.7 million square miles; the US is about 3.8 million square miles. About 83% of the population of the US is urban. About 47% of residents of Africa live in urban areas. One does not need a passport or visa to travel among the 48 contiguous states, but Africa has 48 independent countries (mainland) which require showing passport to cross the bor
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Well in all fairness the president elect doesn’t think covid is a hoax.
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Hawaii has also had it for weeks.
So not all Americans are stupid.
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And has had quarantine requirements for months.
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They still fail to require antibody testing. Obviously if people come in without the virus and with the virus antibodies, they are double plus safe, can not catch it and can not spread it, no quarantine required at all. Now that is much smarter but authorities seem to have developed a really insane aversion to antibody testing, it was also obviate the need for a very, very, profitable vaccine and the lobbyists do not want that and expect people who can not catch the virus to risk their lives with the vaccin
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
They still fail to require antibody testing. Obviously if people come in without the virus and with the virus antibodies, they are double plus safe, can not catch it and can not spread it, no quarantine required at all. Now that is much smarter but authorities seem to have developed a really insane aversion to antibody testing, it was also obviate the need for a very, very, profitable vaccine and the lobbyists do not want that and expect people who can not catch the virus to risk their lives with the vaccine because PROFITS FIRST.
I have been cured of HCV and can tell you that having antibodies and still being at too low a level for a pcr test to pick up the presence of the virus can be a problem. I have also had my first shot of vaccine and will most likely will show a positive result with a covid antibodies test. We do not know yet at what level of infection the virus is not transmitted. The same with HCV so to ascertain whether or not I am free from HCV took over 2 years of testing below the LOC of HCV testing by pcr. I will always show positive for HCV antibodies although they may very well leveled off and not be at a high level now, 5 years after being cured with the drug Harvoni.
The real problem with this virus is we do not know the length of human immunity or whether or not it will quickly mutate into a form that the old antibodies cannot handle. So in theory this disease may very well turn out to be a rival for the black plague if we do not do the science necessary and keep up the international vaccinations and put a great value on the institutions like the WHO and especially the shared science that helped us eradicate polio and even small pox in some places.
Link to a pdf about pcr rna testing and what it can and cannot do. [cdc.gov]I do not know the accuracy LOC for covid by pcr testing but a positive test may or may not mean that you can spread the virus so the better safe than sorry approach is called for all who show a positive antibody test which can be done in the field without the need of expensive equipment and highly trained staff.
Thus the quarantine requirement with positive covid 19 antibody tests. You cannot know whether or not you are infected without a positive quantitative pcr test or obvious symptoms of a chronic infection. If you test positive for the presence of the virus it can be at low levels, but you can also have a false negative occur if the infection is below the test LOC during the test.
So the assholes that still refuse to wear masks and think that this virus will ignore them are complete jerks and need be put on body removal duties at seniors facilities, just maybe then they will get the message.
PS. I have also worked in the field and have done body removal and I have also worked in the field transporting the living and near dead and was qualified in field emergency transport procedures. I do not suffer from delusions about how serious respiratory diseases can become. Hell even norwalk can do a re-infect cycle in care homes and take out your parents and even you if you fail to take precautions and react strongly to a norwalk infection. I can tell you from experience that it has a smell that is sickening sweet when you puke and shit until you become badly diaphoretic and need to go on saline and electrolytes. Covid 19 is much worse it slowly suffocates you by drowning if it becomes chronic, it is not a quick or pleasant way to go to say the least.
I may very well have to go to work as I am retired but still on the call list. I am dreading having to help remove the dead and dying this time around but I am an old soldier and I will do my duty if called! I only do this as an anon because there are still Trump tards trying to cloud and obscure the truth and I do not want to become another one of their favorite targets!
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shit I meant LLOQ or lowest level of quantification of the virus in testing
NOT LOC it ain't quite the same as doing kloc counts so that IBM gives you the cash for your work! And yes I am also into computers a little and fondly remember the good old IBM vs SCO fun. Oh for a date with one of the BSD babes! Time for a little return to the sanity of bashing the Windows network stack swiss cheese or doing a little drop of the code snippets from trumpet winsock.
The point is unless you educate the public and kee
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
Also the vaccines are not 100% effective. Depending on the particular one you get and if it is properly administered they can be anywhere from 50% to 95% effective.
So in the best case you still have a 1 in 20 chance of getting a disease that could have chronic, debilitating effects, assuming you survive it. And worst case is flipping a coin.
Things won't go back to normal for a long time, certainly not this year. There are plenty of people not willing to take that risk, myself among them.
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So in the best case you still have a 1 in 20 chance of getting a disease that could have chronic, debilitating effects, assuming you survive it. And worst case is flipping a coin.
Whoa there! You are making a huge jump to conclusions! Even without a vaccine, you only have a 1 in 5 chance of having chronic, debilitating effects. The vast majority of people have mild symptoms. Just extrapolating from these facts, you would have a 1 in 100 chance of getting chronic, debilitating effects. However, there is evidence that people that contracted COVID after getting the vaccine have a lower chance of it being severe than those that contracted COVID without the vaccine.
Moderna produced more evidence that its vaccine can prevent severe disease. Of 30 volunteers who developed severe cases of Covid, all had received the placebo, not the vaccine.
-NYTimes [nytimes.com]
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"So in the best case you still have a 1 in 20 chance of getting a disease that could have chronic, debilitating effects, assuming you survive it. And worst case is flipping a coin."
Fortunately, that statement is wrong. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 100% effective in preventing severe cases of COVID. Likewise, even the "50% effective" Sinovac vaccine did not report any severe cases among vaccinated participants. The real number may not be 100% once we have a sample size of millions instead of tens of
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Obviously if people come in without the virus and with the virus antibodies, they are double plus safe, can not catch it and can not spread it,
Not actually true. There are cases of people catching it twice. Not many, but more than zero.
it was also obviate the need for a very, very, profitable vaccine
Profitable? Its being provided at vert near to cost. Nobody is going to profit off this vaccine.
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Obviously if people come in without the virus and with the virus antibodies, they are double plus safe, can not catch it and can not spread it,
Not actually true. There are cases of people catching it twice. Not many, but more than zero.
I probably had it twice. I picked up something in California in January 2020 with symptoms now tied to COVID-19 (cough, loss of last / smell, shortness of breath, unexpected hike in blood pressure - no fever, though). By the time COVID tests and antibody tests were available to me I tested negative. Then in September I tested positive (I tested negative 2 weeks later). This is anecdotal, but meshes with reports.
it was also obviate the need for a very, very, profitable vaccine
Profitable? Its being provided at vert near to cost. Nobody is going to profit off this vaccine
Profit motive (Score:2)
Thing is, at ~$44 for an antibody test, and ~$20 for the vaccination, I'm going to say that if it was "PROFITS FIRST" they'd be going whole-hog for antibody testing, because that's bigger money.
It's literally cheaper to just hit you up with the vaccine if they suspect that you're not immune to it than to test to check whether you are or not.
Re: WTF? (Score:2)
Is that on top of the test how high you are?
Mile high club got a whole different meaning down there! :S
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What Trump's administration has done is criminal in terms of negligence and incompetence. How they didn't do this and on top of that require 2 weeks quarantine for all incoming passengers shows that Trump will go down as the worst president of all time. Meanwhile new covid and death cases per day keep reaching record highs.By the end of this week 400K will have died of covid.
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Comparable Governments across Europe also didn't put these measures into place until this week.
Even now, it's a bit odd that people coming in via the UK are exempt, given we're suffering higher positive test rates and mortality numbers than we've seen in the past year.
The UK, the US and much of Europe are characterised by tremendously high volumes of international travel, which has a strong economic contribution. There's always a balance between public health and the economy.
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The orangutan in the Oval Office is an Anglophile, and has extensive holdings in England and Scotland. Apparently not all the rats have yet abandoned the sinking ship, someone is trying to keep him happy.
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Turns out TFS is wrong, it's travelers through the US, not from the UK.
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Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah I'm a bit confused too. Here in australia , if you get off a plane, international or interstate, your spending 2 weeks in a government run quarantine hotel and not getting out unless those tests come back negative.
And its worked really well so far. We had one breakout in victoria that left the state shut down for a couple of months, and a few minor scares, but other than that, we havent had much covid at all.
I get the big borders and giant population make it all a bit tricker, but still.... America is supposed to be a get-shit-done country. Its weird to me that it couldn't.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a surprising list of countries that managed it. Of course, being an island helps a lot. But even non-island countries have managed, and it kind of shows where the country works thanks to and where the country works despite its government. In a crisis you see the real faces of friends, but also managers.
And quite frankly, if we were rational people, then we would boot our leaders and replace them with people who can do the job. But of course, as long as they're members of the right party, that won't happen. Sad, really, how we transformed democracy into party-oligarchy. Now we pay the price for electing people based on how well they can play politics and not on how capable they are in their actual job.
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Sad, really, how we transformed democracy into party-oligarchy. Now we pay the price for electing people based on how well they can play politics and not on how capable they are in their actual job.
It is inevitable when you let the people decide that you get the system we currently have. The average person is biased, selfish and has specific views on whats right and wrong for them. They don't educate themselves on the politicians or the parties or the effects of policies that don't affect them directly and are easily bought by false promises.
Winston said it best. “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
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That is why every modern democracy assumes educated and informed voters.
In my childhood, you could still notice that country working towards that goal. There was such good educational afternoon TV when I was a school child. Then everyone in power realized that it works better FOR THEM if they fuck it all up. :-(
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That's one option, another is a really effective test and trace system. Some countries have managed to stay more open to visitors using that.
Of course it can also go catastrophically wrong, e.g. the UK pissed away at least £21 billion on a failed system.
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To some extent, but border quarantines are a tried and tested approach with a long history, and pretty easy to get right. You dont NEED an epidemiological experts panel to oversee it, just facilities and guards that aren't going to do something stupid (The Victoria case here started because some dipshit guard decided to fuck one of the women in quarantine with covid, then caught the train home), and some medical staff trained up to run tests, administer medicine for sick folks and if necessary know when to
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah I'm a bit confused too. Here in australia , if you get off a plane, international or interstate, your spending 2 weeks in a government run quarantine hotel and not getting out unless those tests come back negative.
And its worked really well so far. We had one breakout in victoria that left the state shut down for a couple of months, and a few minor scares, but other than that, we havent had much covid at all.
I get the big borders and giant population make it all a bit tricker, but still.... America is supposed to be a get-shit-done country. Its weird to me that it couldn't.
A situation like this requires strong, top-down leadership promoting a clear, decisive plan, along with leadership at all other stages that are willing to put saving lives before their own political careers. Unfortunately, there are plenty of politicians in the US, particularly at the sate and local levels, that are perfectly willing to take the risk that their constituents might die in order to protect their careers. And what's worse, their constituents cheer them for it.
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Yeah I'm a bit confused too. Here in australia , if you get off a plane, international or interstate, your spending 2 weeks in a government run quarantine hotel and not getting out unless those tests come back negative.
This is the only effective way to do this. What the US govenment is doing is shutting the screen door after the cows have gotten out.
Unfortunately, the political climate in the US is preventing this from happening. [msn.com]
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Even Canada, the US neighbour to the north, requires this.
Whither Canada?
Foreigners, Citizens, or both? (Score:1)
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Likely 2 weeks quarantine on arrival, and a further 2 weeks quarantine on return.
On the other hand, if your work can be done remotely there's no reason you can't work from the quarantine centre.
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I work in healthcare IT, all of our work can be done remote and has been since March. Due to HIPPA all of our work must be done on-shore.
I'm rather worried that you work in healthcare IT and can't spell HIPAA correctly.
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I can't imagine going travelling right now unless you really, really had to. It's a nice fun beach vacation until you end up in with COVID in some foreign hospital where you don't speak the language.
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It's been hard to travel internationally all year.
Re:Foreigners, Citizens, or both? (Score:5, Informative)
Wow. I wouldn't have thought even a troll could be this naive. Travel to the US by citizens of China, Europe and the UK are all banned [cdc.gov] currently and have been for like 6 months. There are exceptions for people with permanent resident status and for things like student visas. And most countries have similar restrictions (though in probably all cases far more coherent). Only someone out of touch with reality would even think that international vacation travel was a thing right now. The world is shut down.
This is actually a great example of how the US federal government has basically ceased to function. The Trump administration put these bans in place by presidential proclamation and then seems to have just forgotten about them. Most of these places now have lower infection rates than the US, and even those that are high now had low rates for many months. The exceptions for student visas appear to have just been implemented with no specific guidance from the main part of the administration. The US government is totally on auto pilot.
They're expensive (Score:1)
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Re: They're expensive (Score:2)
Uuum, maybe it changed while he was in the air?
The rule I mean?
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Uuum, maybe it changed while he was in the air?
The rule I mean?
When a natural disaster strikes and some greedy asshole running a gas station tries to charge $5 more per gallon, lawmakers and society berate and punish them for price gouging. And yet we allow airlines or airports, to pull this kind of crap? $400? The fucking plane ticket was probably cheaper.
Amazing how price gouging, simply doesn't exist in the US medical community.
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Why? You could have probably gotten this done at a health dept wherever you were staying in the US for free had you made the plans to test a couple days before your departure. At least here in Fla, the tests are free and there is no residency requirement, just be prepared to sit in line in your car for a bit.Usually have the result within a day.
My wife and kids are planning on spending 3 weeks with family in Brazil. They need a test in the US from 72 hours before they get into the plane. This announcement means they now need a test in Brazil 72 hours before getting on a plane coming back to the US. My wife is a Brazilian citizen with permanent residency in the US; our children have dual citizenship.
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UK is NOT exempt (Score:5, Informative)
Re: UK is NOT exempt (Score:3)
> fucking insane
And how would that be different from the last weeks? ;)
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To be fair, the UK is one of the very few places that's worse than the US, so we're actually all protecting ourselves from both!
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The US and UK are not neck and neck with each other. Sort the list by cases per 1M population. The US is #7 on that list and the UK is #26 https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Yes, and China is 207th, and Kim Jong-Un is a fucking COVID miracle worker.
So glad we're armed with the facts here...
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The US and UK are not neck and neck with each other. Sort the list by cases per 1M population. The US is #7 on that list and the UK is #26 https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
It depends on what you measure. IMO the # of cases is less interesting, and probably more subject to skew by testing infrastructure than the # of deaths per 1M population. So, that's what I sort the same data by. Currently UK is #9 (1245 deaths per million), and US is #11 (1176 deaths per million). I hope it doesn't sound cold-hearted, but for the purposes of evaluation I also filter out countries with tiny (100,000) populations. Adjusted for those the UK & US are #7 & #9 Anyway, I welcome the
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...To even try and argue that shows the US is doesn't have it running rampant is ridiculous.
Uh, no one was actually claiming that. Whether you're first, seventh, or fifteenth in the list, COVID is running rampant across the fucking planet.
And to assume China or many other countries are being honest about their numbers (I can think of many reasons, from political to national defense), makes you really look stupid for even suggesting that the US is the worst. There are probably at least half a dozen other countries doing far worse. The world, will never hear about it.
Not even America's numbers, ar
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No problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Our government (Germany) just gave a travel warning for outbreaks of armed violence and a generally unstable situation for the entire US. Nobody here is crazy enough to fly over anymore.
We wish you all the best though.
And if not, we will reclaim the land with respect. Pinkie swear. ;)
Re:No problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody here is crazy enough to fly over anymore.
For many of us, that's been true since the US's batshit crazy reaction to 9/11. There was some hope things would get better under Obama, but then Trump proved it was possible to be even worse than George W...
Well until sanity returns over there, no tourist $ from all those who agree with that assessment.
Sigh, useless (Score:4, Interesting)
First, the BEST CASE false negative rate of standard tests is about 20%, somewhere around day 8. Usually just after the onset of symptoms.
The first four days have a false negative rate of nearly 100%.
Of course, you can also get infected literally moments after the test, meaning that you can gestate the virus for a couple days before you get on a plane.
You should be required to have at least two negative tests spread a few days apart, or better yet, a two week quarantine before travelling. Otherwise, this is barely slowing it down.
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People's brains are binary. Negative test, no COVID. Positive test, COVID. What's that? There are false positives and negatives? Stop trying to confuse everyone with your intellectual elitism.
I was seriously told be a clinician once that a test I was working on had to read out as positive or negative otherwise it would never be accepted.
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I was seriously told be a clinician once that a test I was working on had to read out as positive or negative otherwise it would never be accepted.
Well, it's testing for condition X. If it finds X, that's a positive. If X fails then the default is not-X, which is a negative for X.
So in that regard it's perfectly reasonable. Any other outcome would be "might be X" which isn't really helpful, as you already knew that - why else test.
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I'm not sure if you were trying to demonstrate my point, but if so, thanks?
Any observation, whether it's a medical test or measuring the position of Mercury, will have some error. If you impose a positive/negative threshold then you'll have some false positives and some false negatives. So any test, doesn't matter what it is, can only decrease the "might" in "might be X". Human brains are extremely bad at intuitively grasping this fact, and it causes a lot of problems.
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Human brains are extremely bad at intuitively grasping this fact
That's because it's so unintuitive that I'm struggling to follow your logic.
X? -> unknown
Test X -> X, !X (as appropriate)
If Test is accurate, unknown -> X, !X
If Test is not accurate, unknown -> wrong
I don't understand how you think that replacing uncertainty with wrongness is decreasing the 'might'.It's explicitly making things worse.
What you were challenging is a test that results in
Text X -> X, !X, ??
This adds an additional failure state, unknown -> ??
So now we've gone from uncertainty t
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Let me give you a concrete example. Actually two (maybe three?), because there are two things going on here.
1) US guidelines for urine opioid tests used to set a particular threshold for a positive. That threshold was rather aggressive, and there were a lot of false positives. So the threshold was raised. It's still quite possible to get a false positive by eating some poppyseed bagels the day of the test, although on a test that gives a continuous readout it's quite low. On a +/- test you get back a +. On
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It feels you'd rather provide people with the information needed to make a judgement call, rather than tell them a concrete answer. I can understand that, but
Assume you're a regulator deciding whether to let people on a plane, and into the country with no quarantine. A negative test seems like a great criterion right? Did you take into account the false negative rate? Does anyone? There are countless studies on this, and the answer is, most people, physicians or otherwise, are very bad at taking into account things like test performance, prevalence, etc.
While I agree they're very bad at that, I'm not sure the answer is to give them a test result that's even harder to interpret.
"Sorry Sir, we can't let you onto the aircraft as your test result is 'sort of' and we're feeling a bit risk adverse today."
There would be anger.
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Regulators have to establish a decision threshold, but that's not what I'm talking about.
You yourself mentioned taking into account the error rates. If you do that, your "certain" answer goes back to being uncertain. That's because there is no certainty. My point is that 1) you reduce the error rate by using the raw test result and thresholding, if you're going to, only at the end of the calculation; and 2) in many circumstances it is valuable not to apply a threshold at all, and rather communicate the unce
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Do you know what a positive routine screening mammogram means?
It means "Sweetheart, can you check me for lumps?"
I'm not saying that I welcome this invitation but..
(ok, I concede. I'm too tired to provide an adult response here)
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People can kind of work with percentages, the problem is when they get to 50/50, or to 5/95.
If you take the weather as an example, you'll almost never see a 50% chance of rain, because the coin-flip nature of it makes most people confused. Meteorologists will skew the result to give you a slightly better idea of what to do.
But also a 5% chance of rain reads as 0% to most people, so if it rains, they're angry. So I agree with you in the sense that people can find non-exact values a bit confusing, but also, w
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The goal isn't to prevent 100% of infected people entering the country. The goal is to reduce the number of infected people entering the country.
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First, the BEST CASE false negative rate of standard tests is about 20%, somewhere around day 8. Usually just after the onset of symptoms.
The first four days have a false negative rate of nearly 100%.
Where did you get this information? New Zealand has been highly successful at containing COVID-19, and they test at days 3 and 12 of managed isolation. [miq.govt.nz] From following the Health Ministry's press conferences, the majority of cases are detected on day 3. [beehive.govt.nz] (sorry, I don't know the exact date, it's more of a trend)
Typically a PCR test can detect the disease before onset of symptoms, [nytimes.com] around the time the individual becomes contagious.
Irony. (Score:2)
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A bit pointless (Score:2)
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If you talk to a random person in the US right now, there is a 0.025% chance that they have covid.
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declare Trump's term a natural disaster (Score:2)
This will allow aid to be freed up for urgent medical attention given to those in need of respirators, etc. It will also reboot cashflow for affected small businesses and solo professionals. And don't hesitate to lockdown again if necessary. It's working where it's in place around the world. There's only another 8-12 months of this to go - provided vaccinations reach the level needed for herd immunity. What's 12 months of common sense response to a public health disaster compared to the past four fucking
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/yawn
Same should be required for _ALL_ passengers (Score:3)
It is insane that anyone's allowed without being tested even on a domestic flight or "if transiting through the UK"
Are the US authorities just not serious at all about trying to mitigate the spread?
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It is insane that anyone's allowed without being tested even on a domestic flight or "if transiting through the UK"
Are the US authorities just not serious at all about trying to mitigate the spread?
Unfortunately not yet. But many citizens are. I haven't been indoors unmasked with anyone outside my immediate family since March. And when I am indoors masked I keep it brief.
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In the day or two it takes to get your test result back, ...
No. It takes 45 minutes turnaround to get results for an antigen test. The requirement should be that the test Has been completed within the past 24 hours with results verified before being allowed to gain access to the airport.
... It has also been confirmed that you can be spreading it for days before a test will even pick it up as a positive result.
None of this means that we should not require people be tested recently and regularly before
Finally something which makes sense (Score:2)
It's just good sane policy to prevent the spread of COVID-19 to the rest of the world by testing Americans before they get let off their island ;-)
But seriously man most countries have had policies on this for many months already. Comically the people in the UK just discovered that as part of wanting to be independent of the EU they are now independent enough that they are getting turned around at customs if they don't have a critical reason for travelling during the pandemic, something which does not apply
How does.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I heard there is a pandemic. (Score:2)