COVID Testing Requirement for US-Bound Travelers Has Ended Peter Sullivan - The Hill
go to original June 12, 2022

CDC Lifts COVID Test Requirement (Two Expats Mexico)

The Biden administration announced Friday that it was ending a requirement that international travelers test negative for the coronavirus before coming to the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “has determined based on the science and data that this requirement is no longer necessary at this time,” a senior administration official said.

The requirement ended at 12:01 a.m. Sunday.

Some experts had noted that the requirement did not seem to be serving much purpose, given that COVID-19 is already circulating widely within the United States.

The travel industry had also lobbied to remove the requirement, saying it was no longer needed.

“It’s unclear what pre-arrival testing was actually achieving,” tweeted Jennifer Nuzzo, an infectious diseases expert at Brown University. “My experience getting tested abroad left me unconvinced that tests were actually being performed in a useful way. It seemed more likely that I got a negative result for a price.”

The move is another sign of a new era of COVID-19 where some of the measures designed when the virus was seen as an overwhelming crisis are being wound down.

Administration officials have touted that even as cases have risen in recent weeks, deaths have stayed largely flat, an indication of the protection against severe disease offered by vaccines and booster shots, as well as treatments such as the Pfizer medication Paxlovid.

Still, the administration said it is leaving the door open to reinstating the requirement if a concerning new variant prompts the need.

Read the rest at The Hill