“Seriously reconsider going abroad now,” Deputy Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Ian Brownlee told reporters in a call on Tuesday. “US citizens who choose to travel abroad, whether for vacation or a genuine emergency, all need to be prepared to be potentially disturbed in their travels.”
“If you cannot easily access a Covid-19 test, or if the test is positive, you will end up abroad for much longer than you planned,” added Brownlee. “If this happens, you will be responsible for covering your medical and accommodation expenses during that period.”
The director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention at the Global Migration and Quarantine Division, Marty Cetron, said in the same call that “the main message is that this is not really a time for people to engage in discretionary travel, and that all travel should be postponed until we can better control the virus and accelerate our vaccination strategies. “
Despite the warnings, Brownlee said the State Department is not considering issuing a global Level 4 warning: Don’t Travel and will continue to issue country-by-country warnings. The department issued the worldwide alert against international travel last March and suspended it in August, but said at the time that it continued to “advise American citizens to be careful when traveling abroad due to the unpredictable nature of the pandemic”.
Brownlee said on Tuesday that the State Department is “committed to helping American citizens abroad who are in dire straits, but that assistance is likely to be limited.”
“Our goal is to help people avoid these terrible difficulties in the first place,” he said. US embassies will be able to provide information on where to get medical care and Covid tests, Brownlee said, but they will not provide those 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 combat the virus and use all the measures that we have at our disposal here,” he said. “As a result, we republished the original order that the CDC issued on January 10, January 12, which went into effect today.”
“Most importantly, the exemption that was initially contemplated to extend the implementation deadline for a few weeks has been removed from this order, although we have specifically added a specific humanitarian emergency exemption to take into account,” added Cetron.
He said the decision to remove the exemption was made because “it was determined that we needed to implement this test strategy quickly today and not allow another two weeks”.
“Furthermore, when we observed the outbreaks of this virus that took place, particularly in the months before Thanksgiving Day and during the holiday season – Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year – we were seeing a virus outbreak at a time when that more variants were becoming more and more contagious, “he said. “And it was a combination of all of those factors that led to the urgency to remove the additional two-week extension for implementation, and put it into effect immediately at 12:01, midnight.”
Cetron told reporters that “they are conducting daily morning operation calls with airlines to … get feedback on early launch and implementation.” He said that any problems that arose during the night were “anticipated” and they “have several hotlines available to judge things that may arise in the middle of the night”.
Both officials suggested that talks were underway about possible restrictions on travel across land borders.