“Now seriously reconsider going overseas,” Acting Assistant Secretary of State Ian Brownlee told reporters on Tuesday. “American citizens who choose to go abroad, whether for a vacation or a real emergency, must all be prepared to be seriously disrupted in their travels.”
“If you do not have easy access to a Covid-19 test, or if you are positive, you will end up overseas much longer than you planned,” Brownlee added. “If this happens, you are responsible for covering your own accommodation and medical expenses during that time.”
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Marty Cetron’s Division for Global Migration and Quarantine, said on the same call that the ‘message of the conclusion is that it really is not a time for people to engage in discretionary travel and that all travel should be postponed until we are better able to control this virus, and to accelerate our vaccination strategies. ‘
Despite the warnings, Brownlee said the State Department is not considering issuing a global Level 4: Do not issue travel advice, and that they will continue to issue advice per country. The department issued the global warning against international travel in March and lifted it in August, but said at the time that it continued “to urge US citizens to be careful when traveling abroad due to the unpredictable nature” of the pandemic. “
Brownlee said Tuesday that the State Department “is committed to helping U.S. citizens abroad who find themselves in dire situations, but that assistance is likely to be limited.”
“Our goal is to help people avoid the serious need in the first place,” he said. U.S. embassies will be able to provide information on where medical care and Covid tests can be obtained, Brownlee said, but will not provide the tests.
“As these variants increase, the risks of international travel are really highlighted by the urgency that President Biden and this government have taken to fight the virus and use all the measures we have at our disposal here,” he said. “As a result, we have posted the original order issued by the CDC on January 10, January 12, which went into effect today.”
“Most importantly, the waiver, which was initially intended to extend the implementation deadline by a few weeks, was removed from this order, although we specifically added a specific humanitarian emergency exemption to take into account,” Cetron added. .
He said the decision to remove the waiver was taken because “it has been determined that we must implement this testing strategy quickly today and allow no further two weeks.”
“When we look at the increases in the virus that have taken place, especially in the months before Thanksgiving and during the holiday season – Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year – we only see an increase in increase in the virus by a time when more of the variants were increasingly contagious, “he said.” And it was a combination of all these factors that led to the urgency to remove the additional two-week extension for implementation, and that immediately at 12:01, midnight put into operation. “
Cetron told reporters they were making a daily morning call with the airlines to get feedback on the early deployment and implementation. “He said that ‘problems’ that come up overnight are ‘expected’ and that they ‘have different hotlines available to assess issues that arise in the middle of the night.’
Both officials suggested that talks continue about possible restrictions on travel across land borders.