U.S. CDC removes All Countries From COVID-19 travel restrictions

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States (U.S.), has removed all countries from its top COVID-19 travel advisory warning.

The agency’s travel list released on Monday indicated that several countries have been delisted from the center’s “Level 4: Special Circumstances/Do Not Travel” category. The CDC website read: “There are no Level 4 COVID-19 Travel Health Notices at this time.” About 100 countries were listed as “Level 4” by the CDC earlier this year.

Many countries previously labeled “Level 4” are now designated as “Level 3: COVID-19 High” or “Level 2: COVID-19 Moderate.”

The decision was made days after the federal health agency resolved to update its travel advisory system, saying that the highest-risk category will only be reserved for extreme scenarios.

The CDC in a statement last week indicated: “To help the public understand when the highest level of concern is most urgent, this new system will reserve Level 4 travel health notices for special circumstances, such as rapidly escalating case trajectory or extremely high case counts, emergence of a new variant of concern, or healthcare infrastructure collapse.”

The CDC added that three other warning levels will be determined primarily by the number of COVID-19 cases in a country over the past 28 days.

The center maintained: “With this new configuration, travelers will have a more actionable alert for when they should not travel to a certain destination (Level 4), regardless of vaccination status, until we have a clearer understanding of the COVID-19 situation at that destination.”

The U.S. Travel Association trade group had earlier demanded the Biden administration to update its travel advisory policies.

The group a letter declared: “The CDC should ensure that Americans are not dissuaded from traveling to any place with COVID-19 case rates that are equal to, or less than, the case rates prevailing in the U.S.

“As conditions continue to improve, the CDC should end all ‘avoid travel’ advisories for vaccinated individuals.”

The group insisted that in the future, the White House “should avoid the use of travel bans from specific countries, which are not recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and have proven to be an ineffective means of preventing the spread of COVID-19.”