Jen Kirby reports in Vox and Russell Berman reports in The Atlantic:
The European Union will block Americans from traveling to the bloc as those countries reopen to other travelers, a policy that reflects the United States’s failure to control the coronavirus. The US’s spiraling coronavirus outbreak will also hurt US tourism, as Europeans, and anyone else, will be unlikely to visit.This will have real consequences for the US. New York, the state that was once the international hot spot for the coronavirus, is (now) a relative safe harbor. Travelers to New York from the states where COVID-19 is spreading rampantly are required to self-quarantine for 14 days. Violators will be subject to thousands in fines.The Atlantic: The celebration of new york city’s long-awaited reopening has yet to reach its most hated airport. Were it not for the sunlight streaming through the sparkling floor-to-ceiling windows at LaGuardia Airport’s newest baggage claim on Tuesday morning, you would have sworn it was the middle of the night. Not one of the nine conveyor belts was delivering luggage, and not a single traveler was waiting to be reunited with their Samsonite.
VOX: The European Union will reportedly block most Americans from traveling to the bloc even as those countries reopen to other travelers, a policy that reflects the United States’s failure to fully control the coronavirus pandemic.The European Union restricted nonessential travel to most of its member-states under rules in effect until at least June 30. But starting July 1, European countries are loosening some of those measures and allowing travel again from more than a dozen countries — including China (if Beijing allows EU travelers too) — that meet certain criteria, including their ability to contain the coronavirus.Right now, the United States doesn’t make the cut.This is not altogether surprising. Europe was once the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, with Italy, Spain, and France some of the hardest hit countries in the bloc. Aggressive lockdown measures drove down cases, and many European countries have slowly reopened. And while there have been spikes across the continent, overall, Europe’s cases have declined.The United States had long since overtaken Europe as the epicenter of the crisis. And, unlike its allies overseas, America is now seeing a massive surge in cases in some states. As of June 26, the United States has confirmed more than 2.4 million coronavirus cases and recorded more than 124,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. On Friday, the United States confirmed a record 40,000 new coronavirus cases nationwide.The New York Times’s Matina Stevis-Gridneff first reported Friday that EU officials had finalized the list of acceptable countries Friday after what she described as “tortuous negotiations”:The United States is not alone in being excluded, and travelers from other countries, including Russia, are also barred from visiting.Still, this is a dramatic decision from some of America’s closest allies, and it has serious implications for trade and travel, especially as both the US and Europe seek to rebuild their economies in the aftermath of the pandemic.The EU ban should be a wake-up call for the US. But will it be?
On March 11, as the number of coronavirus cases began to tick up in the United States, President Donald Trump announced a travel ban on anyone arriving from the 26 Schengen zone countries of the European Union. (The ban was expanded a few days later to include Ireland and the United Kingdom.)Trump touted the decision as a way to protect Americans, though some doubted its effectiveness in really slowing the spread of the virus, which was already circulating in communities around the US.The abrupt policy change also caused confusion about who could and couldn’t return to the US, leading to chaos at airports and potentially backfiring as a rush of people returned to US airports.The announcement also caught European leaders by surprise. They condemned the unilateral decision, adding yet another strain to the US’s transatlantic partnerships under Trump.But, on March 17, EU states agreed to bar nonessential travel on its external borders, which included the United States. That has since been extended to the end of June. Tensions also existed within the European Union, as some member-states temporarily sealed off their borders to other EU members in an attempt to contain the virus. A hallmark of the Schengen zone is free and frictionless travel, and countries turning inward presented a real test for the EU during this crisis.Since then, the EU has somewhat regrouped, including with a major pandemic recovery plan. And unified travel rules would also help; though individual EU countries can make their own rules on who can and can’t visit, embracing a consistent policy across member-states would eliminate the need for internal controls as the continent reopens for businesses and tourism.Travel restrictions will be reevaluated every two weeks based on specific science and epidemiological criteria, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the possibility of a US ban earlier this week.Even so, the EU extending a ban on American travel is a remarkable development. The expectation in a global pandemic would be to see allies like the US and Europe working together; instead, the coronavirus crisis has shown just how deeply the partnership has deteriorated — and how Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has diminished US standing.Since the start of his administration, Trump has picked fights with European leaders on trade, NATO, the Iran deal, and random other things. That has worn on the friendship, and an unprecedented global crisis has damaged it even more. The US recently declined to participate in a global vaccine summit, a glaring absence as leaders from around the world pledged cooperation to find a vaccine. European leaders have also criticized Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the World Health Organization.The US was supposed to host the G-7 summit at the end of June; Trump postponed it for obvious pandemic reasons but then tried to reschedule it in June as a sign of the US’s reopening. German Chancellor Angela Merkel swiftly rejected the invitation, and Trump had to postpone again until September.Once seen as a leader, rallying other countries to respond and coordinate in response to virus outbreaks, the US took a backseat internationally during the coronavirus and floundered at home. That damaged the US’s reputation as a superpower. It also revealed a global leadership vacuum; this is what happens when the United States looks inward. Both have damaged the US’s global reputation.And this will have real consequences for the United States. Business travel to Europe has all but fizzled, and it will be difficult to resume with a ban — which could have consequences as the United States and Europe seek to rebuild their economies. And while Europeans might be enjoying American-tourist-free zones, the decline of international travel has already hit countries like Italy and France quite hard. Travel restrictions could make that recovery even harder. And the US’s spiraling coronavirus outbreak will also hurt US tourism, as Europeans, and pretty much anyone else, will be unlikely to visit, presuming Trump lifts the current travel bans and they’re allowed to.Trump has embraced travel bans since he took office, which he has justified as a way to defend the country and protect national security. Now, after its embarrassing coronavirus response, the US is on the receiving end, experiencing what it’s like to for everyone else to try to keep Americans out.
It was 10:30 a.m. on the day after New York City had allowed offices to reopen and outdoor dining to resume—the second step in the city’s long, tentative journey back from the depths of coronavirus hell. I had gone to LaGuardia to see whether people were returning to the city now that it was reopening, and in particular from those places, such as Florida, where the coronavirus is resurgent.
“It’s kind of scary,” said Joe Depalo, a 70-year-old man who was waiting to pick up his parents, arriving from Florida. Both are in their 90s and had left New York in late January for some mid-winter sun. “They were going to go for a month,” Depalo told me. “They got stuck for five.” Depalo and his wife were planning to drop them off at their home and then get tested for COVID-19 just in case.
Normally, the airport would be bustling at this hour, with business travelers and tourists landing from early-morning flights. But LaGuardia’s return has been slow: The volume of flights and passengers has ticked up since April, but the airport’s June numbers remain a staggering 92 percent lower than they were a year ago.
Governor Andrew Cuomo would rather things stay that way a while longer. On Wednesday, he announced that travelers to New York from any of the several states where COVID-19 is spreading rampantly would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival. Violators will be subject to potentially thousands of dollars in fines and “mandatory quarantine,” wherein government agents check on you at home. It’s not clear how well New York can enforce the policy, but it will likely dissuade travel from those states—forcing Floridians, Texans, and Arizonans, among others, to think twice about trying to escape their epidemics by seeking refuge in a state that only recently beat back its own. “We have to make sure the virus doesn't come in on a plane again,” Cuomo said on Wednesday. “We learned that lesson. Been there, done that.”
The governor—famously competitive and reluctant to let go of a grudge—would probably be lying if he said he took no pleasure in his new order. In the early spring, when the pandemic overwhelmed New York’s hospitals and filled its morgues, Rhode Island briefly tried to block New Yorkers from fleeing across its border, and Donald Trump said he was considering a blockade of the tristate area. Florida implemented a mandatory self-quarantine for travelers from New York; the order doesn’t expire until July 7, so a New Yorker who lands in Florida tomorrow technically must still self-isolate, even though the virus’s spread is now far worse in the Sunshine State.
New York, the state that was once the international hot spot for the coronavirus, is suddenly a relative safe harbor. Florida reported a record 5,511 cases on Wednesday, twice the number it reported a week earlier; at its peak, New York was reporting more than 10,000 cases a day, but that has dropped steadily to fewer than 600 per day this week.
At LaGuardia on Tuesday morning, the first two flights of the day from Florida landed just before 11:30 a.m., depositing a few dozen passengers into a brand-new terminal that Cuomo opened just two weeks ago. The project is part of a $8 billion overhaul of LaGuardia that was inspired, in part, by Joe Biden, who infamously compared the long-maligned, 80-year-old airport to “a third-world country” in 2014.
The coronavirus outbreak and a corresponding plunge in traffic helped officials speed up construction of new roadways surrounding LaGuardia—part of a broader infrastructure boost aided by stay-at-home orders. Inside, the pandemic has turned the new terminal’s debut into something of a soft launch, but the result is an airport that feels like it was designed from the get-go with a pandemic in mind. Hand-sanitizer stations are accompanied by antibacterial-wipe dispensers so that passengers can clean their luggage as soon as it comes off the baggage belt (or hoard them for their homes). The plexiglass barriers protecting clerks at the information desk look like permanent features, not ad hoc additions. Elevators have footprint icons affixed to the floor, guiding riders to space out as much as possible; a sticker on the console assures you that the buttons are on an “antimicrobial protected surface.” Even the pet-relief area—fence-enclosed, with artificial grass and doggy-doo receptacles—looks pristine.
LaGuardia requires anyone in the terminal to wear a mask, and of the passengers I saw, most had complied. They were landing right under the wire—among the final people from Florida who could travel freely in the state once they left the airport. Cuomo had been floating the new quarantine order for a few days, and most of the dozen or so people I spoke with were aware of the possibility. “Honestly, I’m really glad I got here before he announced any of that,” Dylan, a 22-year-old law student from Sarasota who declined to give his last name, told me. “Florida wasn’t great, so I wasn’t sad leaving there.”
The governors of New Jersey and Connecticut joined Cuomo in issuing similar self-quarantine orders for travelers, creating something of a regional bubble. The directives could complicate the plans of New Yorkers who have been riding out the pandemic down south and waiting until the situation back home has stabilized to return. David Meister, a 28-year-old medical resident, flew back from Miami on Tuesday and is scheduled to start a new job at a Manhattan hospital next week. He had received no guidance from the hospital on whether he was supposed to quarantine or get tested, although he told me that he was hoping to take a test for COVID-19 antibodies. When I asked him what he’d do if Cuomo ordered a quarantine, Meister paused. “I think I’d have to discuss that with my bosses,” he replied.
Shaun Harris, 25, was waiting to board a flight to Miami to assist in a photo shoot that had already been postponed twice because of the pandemic. “I’m not happy about it, but it’s for work,” she told me.
Neither Florida nor New York is actively tracking travelers after they arrive (although Cuomo said Thursday there would be “random checks), and none of the passengers returning from Florida whom I interviewed at LaGuardia said they were restricted once they arrived. But because they knew that the COVID-19 outbreak was worsening in the state, they decided to lay low anyway. Baindu Massaquoi, 29, a surgical technician at New York–Presbyterian, had just come back from a five-day vacation to visit her cousin and a few friends. They mostly hung out at her cousin’s home because of the virus. “I did think I would be going out more,” she told me.
Cuomo acknowledged that his self-quarantine order would be difficult if not impossible to fully enforce. He compared it to speeding. “You can argue that every law is an honor system until you get caught,” the governor said. “You can violate the quarantine until you get caught, and then when you get caught, you’re in mandatory quarantine and you’re fined thousands of dollars.”
The governor doesn’t have the power to stop flights from other states, and he didn’t say whether other measures, such as temperature checks for arriving passengers, were being considered. Temperature checks would “do very little,” Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “Because so many infections spread by people who have been infected but are not showing symptoms … it would have limited impact.”
Some of the travelers I interviewed had been most anxious about the flight itself, fearful of how quickly the airborne virus can spread inside a cramped airplane cabin. Both flights arriving Tuesday morning were not full but still crowded, even though airlines have, for the most part, kept middle seats empty to aid in distancing.
Fortunately for Cuomo, many of the passengers I spoke with weren’t heading anywhere other than home, to reunite with family they hadn’t seen in months. Crystal Faroqi, 30, was wiping down her suitcase after hauling it off the conveyor belt. She told me that she had returned from Mississippi—where cases are also increasing—to care for her mother, who is having surgery in July. But Faroqi flew back earlier than she had initially planned partly out of fear that the governor would order a traveler quarantine. “I’m going to stay from her for 12 days,” she said.
Katrina Gonzalez, 19, was returning to New York for the first time in months. She’ll be staying with her family in the Bronx, which has been hit harder, per capita, than any of the city’s other four boroughs. More Bronx residents have died from the coronavirus—at least 3,732, according to the city’s count—than in the entire state of Florida. Gonzalez wasn’t fazed by the possibility of a self-quarantine order. “We were already planning to not go anywhere,” she told me. “Probably a month, just in case.”
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