‘Like What We Saw In the Early Days of the Pandemic’: U.S. Announces All Travelers From China Must Test Negative For Covid to Board a Flight

Josh Lederman, a national political reporter for NBC News, joined Hallie Jackson on MSNBC on Wednesday to break the news that the U.S. will reintroduce Covid-19 travel restrictions from China.

“Beginning Jan. 5th at 12:01 a.m., they will begin requiring a negative COVID test pre-departure from anyone coming from China. It doesn’t matter if you’re Chinese, American, or anything else,” Lederman began, adding:

If you’re coming by plane from China to the United States, you’re going to have to get a negative COVID test up to two days before departure. It can be a PCR test. It can also, interestingly, be one of those antigen self-tests that you take. If it’s the kind that you do via telehealth, which means essentially somebody is on a webcam watching you take that COVID test, and you kind of hold up the results of that.

They can see that it’s a negative test, and that way you can get a piece of paper that says, look, this person actually did have a COVID, a negative COVID result. The US also says that in response to these concerns in China, they are stepping up their tracking and surveillance of travelers who are coming into the country by adding two new airports in Los Angeles and Seattle to that monitoring program as they try to get a handle on this. And they acknowledged fully U.S. health officials that this is not going to prevent every single COVID case from entering the country from China. But they say it will go a long ways towards trying to slow the spread.

“And they also reiterate that the US continues to make offers to China to help it with its COVID crisis, including an offer of vaccines. But they say so far China has not been willing to take the US up on that offer, although they say that offer still stands despite these new restrictions going into place on January 5th,” Lederman concluded.

“This is you know, this does feel in many ways and Josh, you alluded to this like what we saw in the early, early days of the pandemic. Right. The imposition of travel restrictions and the onus on in this instance. Right. The onus is on airlines to get this stuff implemented,” noted Jackson.

“That’s exactly right. The airlines are going to be the ones who are going to take a look at your COVID negative COVID test and decide, you know, whether or not it meets the criteria. Whether to let you on to that flight. That is the key reason that health officials are not putting in this policy into place right now,” Lederman replied, adding:

You might say. All right, well, we’re concerned right now. We do this immediately. Might it be too late if we wait until January 5th? But just like we saw when the US imposed travel restrictions at the very beginning of the pandemic, this creates chaos for airlines at a time when, as we have been covering, there’s plenty of chaos already in the airline industry.

“And so public health officials say that they will start this on January 5th so that they can work with the airlines to help them understand what is going to be required and help prepare them to be the ones who actually do that verification of these negative COVID tests,” Lederman concluded.
Watch above via MSNBC