Tag Archives for coronavirus.
We’re in a strange place in the pandemic where increasingly people think it is ok to travel while infectious with Covid-19. It is not ok to travel when you are sick and that was true before the pandemic, even though CDC advice used to say that it generally is ok for many people.
“[O]ne in four people who follow a cautious doctor who writes frequently about Covid..think that a known symptomatic Covid case should still go to a terminal and get on a flight.”
Emed sells proctored Covid-19 tests for travel to the U.S. at 6 for $150 plus shipping. Unsurprisingly, they believe that a requirement for passengers to test prior to flying to the U.S. needs to remain in place.
Requiring a negative Covid-19 test to fly to the U.S. did not stop the Omnicron variant from entering the country, and it didn’t stop the Omicron wave. Requiring testing for travel but not for anything else makes no sense at all. The antigen tests that are accepted are hardly a guarantee against a passenger carrying the virus. We aren’t pursuing an ‘eradication’ policy against Covid like China is. Barely-piecemeal efforts are largely symbolic.
But the Biden administration says lifting the testing requirement for international travel is off the table.
Any advocate for testing travelers entering the United States needs to articulate what benefit the testing provides now, why it’s enough of a benefit to justify the restriction, and what condition needs to exist to remove the rule. No one has even tried to do that, because the testing rule isn’t about protecting the country from Covid-19 (it cannot do that) it’s about optics.
With the pandemic hopefully winding down, the federal government is sending out tests at no cost to recipients (‘free’). They’re using the US Postal Service to distribute them and perhaps not surprisingly many report not getting the tests they ordered. (Oddly, the first time around they actually sent me too many tests.
However with much less need for testing now – The 7 day moving average of U.S. reported cases are down 94% from their January 16th peak – only half of the 500 million tests the government ordered have been spoken for. Each household was permitted to order (4) tests previously, no matter how many people lived at a residential address. Starting this week households can order a second set of four tests.
Iceland has become the latest of many countries to remove pandemic-era restrictions. One Mile at a Time says they’re “encourag[ing] people to get infected.”
I don’t think that’s right, and lifting restrictions isn’t a “let ‘er rip” strategy as some have argued, either. It’s simply that the condition that made restrictions make sense early in the pandemic are no longer in effect today.
The U.K. has recognized that a travel testing requirement didn’t provide benefit during the pandemic. It makes little sense in the U.S. where the virus is spreading widely already, and where vaccine boosters are widely available. The specific testing rules in place make even less sense since they don’t universally catch infections. But rules tend to outlive their usefulness even as political narrative. When will U.S. rules change, then?
When I covered cuts in inflight service at the behest of its flight attendants union I pointed out all of the elements of hypocrisy and how this makes the American Airlines product worse.
In some sense American had no choice as a result of broader cultural issues we’re grappling with as we transition from the pandemic to endemic phase of dealing with Covid-19.
The view now is that we just need to get through Omicron. Indeed the industry is gearing up for a return to normal after the Omicron wave. There’s hope that more borders will re-open, more employees will return to office, and there’ll be a return to normal travel and then some given intertemporal substitution – that people refrained from travel for a long time, and will make up for it quickly.
Underlying this belief are several assumptions, which are very much the ‘base case’ but are far from assured.
Seventy eight percent of passengers on a single flight from Italy to India tested positive for Covid-19 on arrival. The Wednesday Boeing 767 charter from Milan Bergamo to Amritsar on EuroAtlantic Airways had 179 passengers on board and 125 tested positive for Covid-19 (78%) after landing. That’s no entirely surprising!
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
