Quote:
Originally Posted by sopas ej
Biden is banning travel to the US from South Africa and some other African nations... but why isn't he banning travel from the UK and Belgium, where this variant has also been detected?
|
Ultimately, banning travel won't work by itself. But what it can do with a competent public health establishment is to minimize the number of people coming into the country carrying the "variant of concern", keeping those numbers within the capacity of public health workers to track, isolate and trace their contacts.
Unfortunately, the US CDC has so far not proven itself competent and I don't have much hope they will take the opportunity they are being handed but we'll see.
This variant is apparently different from previous ones in many respects but the important one here is that it can be detected with the routine PCR test already required of international airline passengers. That should mean that travelers carrying it could be blocked at the country of origin but failing that they can be identified and traced after landing if the numbers are limited.
My guess is that if those numbers become significant in European countries, flights from the one countries may be halted but for now there are only a couple of cases in Europe. As the idea of lockdowns and the rest in early 2020 was to "flatten the curve", the idea here should be to keep the numbers of people entering the country carrying this variant within the capability to trace, and isolate . . . if we are even trying. Otherwise, it probably is pointless to block the travel because the variant will get here and we can only hope it isn't that much more transmissible than delta and that the vaccines work against it.