President Biden’s decision late last week to ban travel from eight southern African countries is unlikely to curb the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant, an epidemiologist warns, and could even be counterproductive.
“While it feels attractive to do a travel ban because it shows action and power and protecting our borders, it actually doesn’t really have a lot of public health impact,” Dr. Stefan Baral, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Yahoo News.
Baral, who is also the director of the school’s Key Populations Program, travels regularly to South Africa for research where he focuses on the distribution and control of diseases in a human rights context. And he said that people rushing to travel in advance of a ban could lead to superspreader events at airports.
“One of the things that happens [with border bans] is that people rush to the airport … when they have that 48-hour grace period,” he said, noting similar rushes last year due to border closures.
“Those are superspreading events that caused a significant amount of seeding across the United States because people hurried back. You also don’t create an environment where people want to report their symptoms because they don’t really even know what happens to them if they report that they’re not feeling well.”
The Omicron variant, which early evidence suggests could evade some preexisting immunity, was first identified on Nov. 23 in South Africa, where less than 25 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. While not much is known about the variant just yet, South Africa’s health minister, Joe Phaahla, said he believes Omicron is behind a steady rise in infection rates across the country.
In response to the variant’s detection, the U.S. banned travel from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi — all countries in the southern region of the continent — as “a precautionary measure until we have more information,” Biden said last Friday.
Other countries have enacted similar measures. In the United Kingdom, 10 countries in the southern part of Africa have been added to the “red list,” which stops short of banning travelers from them from entering the country but labels them high risk. Visitors from red list nations are required to take additional COVID-19 tests and quarantine for 10 days after arrival.
A number of European Union countries have banned travel from southern Africa. Japan, Israel and Morocco have banned all foreign visitors in…
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