Why exempt U.S. from new travel restrictions? Feds point to low Omicron transmission
Global News
According to the new travel rules, anyone coming into Canada from a country other than the U.S. will have to be tested for COVID on arrival, then isolate and await their results.
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra is standing by the decision not to extend new COVID-19 travel restrictions to the United States, saying the government has “no significant reporting of transmission of this new (Omicron) variant in the U.S.”
His comments come as the government implemented multiple new travel restrictions after the discovery of the Omicron variant. According to the new rules, anyone coming into Canada from a country other than the United States will have to be tested on arrival, then isolate and await their results.
“Those measures are temporary for us to learn more about this variant, to learn more about its severity, and we will continually adjust based on the advice and the information that we get,” Alghabra said, speaking during an interview with The West Block host Mercedes Stephenson.
“There are very little reports of community transmission (of Omicron) in the United States. If that changes, we will change our measures.”
As of Friday, Canada had identified 12 cases of the Omicron variant in the country, while the United States had reported just 10 cases in total. However, there have been at least two known U.S. cases of community transmission — one in a fully-vaccinated man in Minnesota who had recently travelled to New York City, and another in an individual in Hawaii with no recent history of travel.
Meanwhile, Canada has an even stricter set of rules in place for travellers from 10 African countries: South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Nigeria, Malawi and Egypt.
South Africa reported thousands of new cases daily this week, and the country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases said that 74 per cent of the 249 samples sequenced in November were identified as Omicron.
Foreign nationals who have been in these countries in the last 14 days are not allowed into Canada, and any Canadians travelling home from these countries will have to be tested at the airport and would have to quarantine while awaiting their test results.
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