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President Joe Biden will reimpose the restrictions placed on travel to the US from Britain, Brazil, Ireland and most of Europe, a White House official said Sunday. The announcements came as the new administration ramps up its pandemic response to slow transmission of coronavirus in the country. Confirming US media reports, Biden will also Monday extend the ban to South Africa, preventing most non-US citizens from entry if they have recently been in SA, where a new strain of the virus has been identified.
Last week, Biden had tightened mask-wearing rules and ordered quarantine for people flying into the United States, as he seeks to tackle the country’s worsening coronavirus crisis. Biden has said that the Covid-19 death toll would likely rise from 420,000 to half a million next month — and that drastic action was needed. “We are in a national emergency. It is time we treated it like one,” he said on Thursday. It is unclear how long the restrictions will continue.
The new President’s actions are a complete opposite of his predecessor Donald Trump who had on January 18, two days before Biden’s inauguration, announced a plan that a Covid-19 ban on travellers arriving from much of Europe and Brazil would be lifted starting January 26, and arrivals to the US would only need to have tested negative for the virus. At the time, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the incoming administration planned to block the move, saying on Twitter that “this is not the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel.” “In fact, we plan to strengthen public health measures around international travel in order to further mitigate the spread of COVID-19,” Psaki had tweeted.
Trump had set the initial ban on January 31, last year, on non-American travellers travelling from China to try to stop the spread of the virus. The restraints were later extended to European countries on March 14 as the pandemic entered full force. More than 25 million Covid-19 cases have been recorded in the US since the pandemic began, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally on Sunday. The milestone was reached only five days after the US, the world’s wealthiest and hardest-hit nation, recorded 400,000 deaths from the disease.
Since his election campaign, Biden has made fighting the coronavirus a priority and is pushing for Congress to approve a $1.9-trillion relief package that would include billions of dollars to boost vaccination rates. The president, who was inaugurated on January 20, has said he wants 100 million people vaccinated within his first 100 days in office, and he has called for Americans to wear masks for 100 days. The US is warily viewing new coronavirus strains that have originated in South Africa and Brazil, as well as one recently identified in the UK that’s more transmissible and potentially more harmful.
From today, all passengers arriving in the US, including citizens, will be required to get a viral test for the coronavirus within three days of their departure, and to provide written documentation of a negative result. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in an order issued on Sunday, eliminated an option for airlines or other aircraft operators with flights from countries that lack the testing capacity for Covid-19 to apply for two-week waivers from the order. “With the US already in surge status, the testing requirement for all air passengers will help slow the spread of the virus as we work to vaccinate the American public,” the CDC said in its order.
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