Lingering COVID-19 Restrictions Are Costly Hazards
Travelers and families find that some officials just can’t let go of pandemic powers.
A friend of mine and his wife recently took a trip to Europe that almost ended in disaster because of positive COVID-19 tests. Fortunately, the results weren't theirs; four other members of their tour group who stood in line at the same pharmacy to get swabbed received the unwelcome results and remained stranded at their own expense while my friend and the rest of the group returned home. It was a reminder that some officials still have trouble letting go of pandemic-inflated power.
"All air passengers 2 years or older with a flight departing to the US from a foreign country at or after 12:01am EST (5:01am GMT) on December 6, 2021, are required show a negative COVID-19 viral test result taken no more than 1 day before travel, or documentation of having recovered from COVID-19 in the past 90 days, before they board their flight," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Applying even to vaccinated and boosted travelers, and with a daunting 24-hour timeframe, the CDC rules make the U.S. an outlier in a world that otherwise seems eager to turn its back on two years of chaotic overreactions to COVID-19. Even Italy, where just months ago people rioted against draconian requirements that they show proof of vaccination to work, shop, and play, dropped its Green Pass within its borders in May and for entry to the country last week. But America's rules linger on and cost people time and money.
"Travel agents and travel insurance companies say they are hearing more tales of travelers stuck abroad due to the U.S. government's rule that people produce a negative test to enter the country by air," The Wall Street Journal reported last week. "Vacationers and business travelers testing positive face pricey extended stays and rebooked flights, confusion over which quarantine rules reign and a near daily scramble to test negative or get a doctor's note vouching for recovery from Covid."
"For Americans traveling internationally, a positive COVID-19 test before returning home can result in thousands of dollars in additional costs for extending hotel stays and rebooking flights," adds Healthline.
Asked in May if the federal government had any plans to eliminate testing requirements for entering the country, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she was "not aware of a timeline for that."
Thousands of dollars in unanticipated costs and uncertain return dates threaten to make travel a luxury once again, accessible only by those with time and money to burn. That's an unpleasant turnaround just a few years after people marveled at how affordable air travel had become in the decades since deregulation. Unfortunately, residual pandemic policy doesn't stop there.
"More than two years after the COVID-19 outbreak forced school officials to shift classes and assignments online, teens continue to navigate the pandemic's impact on their education and relationships, even while they experience glimpses of normalcy as they return to the classroom," Pew Research Center noted last week. And costs for these kids aren't measured in dollars or vacation days.
"From declining test scores to widening achievement gaps, teachers, parents and advocates have raised concerns about the negative impact the pandemic may have had on students. Beyond academic woes, experts also warn that these disruptions could have lingering effects on young people's mental and emotional well-being," Pew added.
Researchers find that children suffered "significant anxiety and depression during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic," according to a May 2021 article in Pediatric Clinics of North America. "Social isolation, loneliness, lack of physical exercise, and family stress may contribute to these problems."
Battles over closures, masks, and bungled remote learning poisoned families' relations with school administrators. New York City schools still require masks on younger children despite protests. Other public schools used the pandemic to impose surveillance states. And there's no guarantee that next year will return to normal. During a press conference, White House COVID-19 coordinator Ashish Jha answered a question about whether schools will be open in the fall with: "Sorry, I have to run off."
Yes, it's true that most pandemic-driven restrictions have been eased or rescinded in most places. We can again dine indoors, walk unmasked in public, and go to the gym through the front door instead of sneaking in the back in defiance of lockdown rules. But there's a sense that the powers-that-be don't want us to get accustomed to free movement and uncovered faces.
"We're going to be dealing with this virus on a chronic basis," Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, recently commented in the tone of an official who is having trouble surrendering his moment in the limelight. "We are not going to eradicate this."
But while "the pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented withdrawal of civil liberties among developed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike," in the words of The Economist's Democracy Index 2021, American officials still have limited power when people push back. At some point, they have to loosen their grip or else get sued, voted out of office, or ignored. Areas where they exercise relatively unchecked power, such as government schools and ports of entry, are windows into what officialdom would like to do if they had a free hand. But even when they get their way, that doesn't mean there's no escape. Just watch families flee public schools.
"The coronavirus pandemic ushered in what may be the most rapid rise in homeschooling the U.S. has ever seen," AP reported in April. "Families that may have turned to homeschooling as an alternative to hastily assembled remote learning plans have stuck with it — reasons include health concerns, disagreement with school policies and a desire to keep what has worked for their children."
Likewise, my COVID-negative friend had a Plan B strategy if his test came back with an inconvenient result. Emulating other travelers, he intended to fly to Mexico and then cross the border by road, which is subject to looser rules.
"Entering the United States by air requires a negative coronavirus test," The New York Times observed at the end of May. "Some people who can't provide one are using a workaround: flying to Canada or Mexico, then entering via a land border." Even hockey players in the NHL are taking advantage of the loophole.
Workarounds and escape strategies both reflect and require a spirit of rebelliousness and disgust with the excesses and failures of bureaucrats and politicians. Officialdom clings to aging rules and reminisces fondly about the days of extraordinary power. But for many people, lingering restrictions are expensive reminders of past mistakes and invitations to treat red tape as a challenging annoyance to be overcome.
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Cue the chorus of whiny voices whining “You were mean to Trump! You wanted this! You voted for Biden! Waaaaah!”
Election do have consequences.
Ideas! Never a troll! Doesn’t use strawman arguments!
Pathetic lol.
Whoof!
Ideas! Never a troll! Doesn’t use strawman arguments!
Where are your ideas? Absent.
Are you never a troll? Hardly.
Do you refrain from using strawman arguments? Ha!
If it wasn’t for strawman arguments he’d have no arguments at all.
“You didn’t say anything about xyz, and this is why! This is what you believe! This is what you mean! Don’t backpeddle on what you never said! You’re a liar!”
Projection. Lol.
I mean fuck, jeff spent all day trying to change very early worded statements into something else.
You did the same yesterday saying I was twisting explicit reports of your past comments.
Is shared delusion what attracts you two to each other?
I am not saying right-leaning folks don’t do this, but left-leaning/progressive folks seem to have adopted it as their central argument technique. The retreat, deny statements/twist words, retreat again, deny/twist. It’s cyclic within the argument, and approaches DARVO, ‘compliments’ the sophistry, projection, baseless and false assertions. I’ve been seeing more sentences ending w/ exclamation points as well, lately. It falls back to the assumption that the writer/speaker believes nobody can see through the deceptive bullshit -they are not excited or honestly being positive, they are pathological liars.
Democrats are essentially 12 year old girls.
So JesseAz is a Democrat?
You saying JesseAz is left-leaning? Because that’s his central argument technique.
Herman Cain used to characterize it as S.I.N.
Shift the subject. Ignore the facts. Name call.
A related tactic, also named by Cain is K.S.I:
They just K.S.I. What’s that? Keep saying it, keep saying it and keep saying it, and some gullible souls will believe it.
The comments of mine that you trolled with had nothing to do with the discussion.
It was you distracting with a red herring while waging your usual “sarc is a hypocrite! Ignore what he says because he’s a hypocrite!” ad hominem argument.
Actually, Jesse, my conversation with you was something like this:
Jesse: Having to take low-level humanities courses for getting a bachelor’s degree is bullshit!
Me: Actually, they are part of a well-rounded education, which is what a Bachelor’s degree signifies. If you don’t want to take the low-level humanities classes, then don’t pursue a Bachelor’s degree.
Jesse: Umm umm umm well College of Victim Studies is bullshit and should be condemned!
You just went from one talking point outrage to another. You don’t have a coherent argument, just anger and simplistic black/white thinking.
He argues with people, not with what people say. He cannot separate the two.
If you noticed all weekend I talked a lot on topic until you and sarc started trolling like usual.
This is you trolling right now.
You talk on topic until someone you have a personal grudge against shows up, and then you use leftist argumentative techniques to try to shut the person down and destroy any conversations they may be trying to have.
Face it dude, your behavior is that of a leftist. Embrace it.
You make a good point. Jesse has many of the hallmarks of many a leftist:
– Complete certainty that he is right on all things, which is impervious to evidence or facts or reason
– Can’t have a polite disagreement, he has to attempt to shut down and utterly destroy people with whom he disagrees
– Can’t recognize his own limitations, if he doesn’t understand an argument, it must mean that the argument itself is wrong, not that he is incapable of understanding it
He reminds me of people I used to work with in restaurants who, when I’d talk about things they couldn’t understand, would call me stupid. Yeah, you don’t understand because I’m the stupid one. Sure, dude.
Hmm, what about entering the US by sea?
I wonder if there would be a market for 1 way passenger cruises from Europe to the US?
Would be faster to wait it out in Europe and fly home.
I can vouch that this is the case. My wife and I are traveling in early October and our trip will end in Canada. Rather than mess with the one calendar day test requirement and risk an extended stay in Montreal, we’re renting a car and driving to Albany to fly home.
In a world full of stupid Covid rules this one may be the stupidest.
Reason spent well over a year parroting the Official Narrative on covid.
Your credibility is gone forever.
Your weak attempts to join decent human beings now that the tide has completely turned are transparent and inadequate.
Burn in hell.
There’s one.
Yourr basically admitting to trolling here lol.
Yes. Why would someone have issue with a supposed libertarian magazine taking a light hand to the usurpation of rights under the guise of covid.
But again you defended Australia rounding people up even without testing positive as just quarantine camps. So liberty isn’t really your thing anyways.
What do you and Jeff get by attacking those who actually want and defend liberty? This is why people call you a fucking leftist. Justice you attacked those against mask mandates but then claimed 6 months later you were never for mandates. Youre lying to yourself about being a libertarian. Just join WaPo comments. They are more your lane.
What do you and Jeff get by attacking those who actually want and defend liberty?
This statement illustrates perfectly why you are a tribalistic moron. You view arguments in terms of personalities, not ideas. You view attacking a person’s argument as the same as attacking the person. News flash, it is entirely possible for two different people, who both want and defend liberty, to have a disagreement with each other. Look at for example Milton Friedman vs. Ayn Rand vs. Murray Rothbard vs. Ludwig von Hayek. They all supported liberty, and yet they all disagreed with each other to various degrees.
You can’t see that. It is all tribes to you.
join decent human beings
What would you know about ‘decent human beings’?
Have you started your murder spree against Democrats yet?
He doesn’t call for murder dumbass. He asks you to kill yourself. Weird how you take offense to that but were defending the millions of dead under socialism yesterday. Good intentions right?
Yes he does. He’s done so many times. He was particularly unhinged after the election.
defending the millions of dead under socialism yesterday.
This is you making shit up to try to stir the pot and start some shit.
“He asks you to kill yourself”.
Because he’s a disturbed piece of shit that is completely incapable of contributing a single useful coherent thought. So, sure, you should defend him.
Aww poor bevis, like collectivistjeff and sarcasmic before he/him, is permanently butthurt that I’ve pointed out how shallow and mediocre his intellectual capacity is.
Post your address, pedo
The Gov was wrong about everything related to the pandemic. Mask effectiveness, vaxx effectiveness, natural immunity vs vaxxed immunity, school closures, testing asymptomatics, every kind of mandate, and especially lock downs. None of it was correct.
The puzzling bit is that the plans that WHO/CDC had in place for this sort of thing would have worked much better at reducing the total amount of harm.
Sarc and Jeff are here to make sure nobody points that out.
We were poorly served by all of our so-called “elites”. Politicians, media, public health officials, universities, you name it. The pandemic response got tangled up in politics and coherent sensibility went out the window.
Um, don’t you think the elites best serve the masses, especially the resistant deplorables, by becoming more elite?
https://twitter.com/JerryDunleavy/status/1533798775369736193?t=DB_9H9WDkpSYGUMNE82-ug&s=19
Here is Ilya Shapiro’s (@ishapiro’s) resignation letter from Georgetown Law, as well as his Wall Street Journal opinion piece explaining why remaining there was untenable despite being reinstated after a four-month investigation into a tweet he’d sent.
[Link]
love a good thanks but no thanks on the way out
The restrictions caused more deaths than SARS-CoV-2. Clearly the Democrats are intent on getting rid of Americans with their COVID mitigating plans, and counting on the influx of illegal immigrants to vote for them.
The end of the COVID-19 pandemic
John P. A. Ioannidis
First published: 28 March 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13782
COVID-19 pandemic, excess deaths may be substantially more than the deaths caused directly from SARS-CoV-2, and include deaths caused by the disruption induced by both the pandemic and the aggressive measures taken…..COVID-19 probably caused substantially fewer deaths in children and adolescents 65 years old, including probably ~1 million deaths in institutionalized residents of long-term care facilities.41, 42 A large share of further excess deaths in these facilities was probably due to abandonment, thirst, and hunger.42
Public health authorities should call the end of the pandemic. This does not mean that the problem is inappropriately minimized or forgotten, but that our communities move on with life. It is unknown when the next pandemic may happen—in less than a year or in more than a century. SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be very unpredictable and unpredictability exists also for influenza. Pandemic preparedness should be carefully thought and pre-organized,82 but should not disrupt life…….The pandemic legacy includes effects on other dimensions of health (besides directly due to COVID-19), society, economy, civilization, democracy, value systems and more. The pandemic and the response to it have affected mental83, 84 and physical health with excess deaths.85-87 Total excess deaths may far surpass those due to SARS-CoV-2 infection.35, 36
That’s what you get for spending your money in a foreign country instead of right here at home.
If you think this is a free country, leave and try to come back.
And before you leave, give your money to Uncle Sam to spend, er, hold for you.
My little brother and his wife forged their negative covid tests back in November. They couldn’t afford the financial loss if they were trapped in Europe and couldn’t get home. Easy-peasy.
Left-leaning politicians are nannies. Left-leaning voters are pussies. Sounds like a match made in heaven (or hell, take your pick).
These rules might make some sense if Covid were entirely absent from the US. Given that it’s widespread everywhere, we might as well just live with the risk. Apparently that’s what we’ll have to do anyway.
At the very least, it would be nice if they gave Covid-positive travelers the option to wear some sort of hazmat suit for the flight home.
Fun facts (from the CDC websites):
Between January 2020 and June 2022 1,000,000 Americans have died from (with, near) COVID. During the same time period 900,000 Americans have died from pneumonia. The distribution of deaths by age cohort is pretty similar, except for babies and kids, where the death rate for pneumonia is 2 to 3 times higher.
We have had actual vaccines for pneumonia for a couple of decades, and data that show effectiveness at least as good as COVID vaccines.
So where is the public hysteria and government pogrom to force pneumonia vaccines? I mean, all the COVID BS so far is because public health is motivated by caring, and that justifies authoritarian over-reach, right?
Better than COVID-19 vaccines, which really don’t work very well at all. They train the immune system to detect and attack two spike proteins from the original variant, and then, thanks to Original Antigenic Sin (OAS), don’t imprint as well on the entire virus, and esp it’s capsid, when finally encountered. Since it’s a fast mutating respiratory virus, and the vaccine was far from sterilizing, the virus quickly mutated those spike proteins (for Omicron). That means that immune systems are being imprinted with an obsolete spike proteins, and nothing more.
Except that those immune systems are already imprinted with those obsolete spike proteins. We know that because most of the side effects we have seen are a result of the immune system attacking the (obsolete) spike proteins generated by 2nd and subsequent doses. Indeed, those are the only ancestral spike proteins encountered – those generated by the vaccines, since the virus has mutated around it.
Most vaccines do their work by imprinting immune systems with knowledge of critical pieces of viruses. This is done in most cases with the first jab with the COVID-19 RNA vaccines. What’s the purpose of the 2nd and subsequent jabs? It’s not to imprint the immune system, because that was most often done by the first jab. The answer appears to be to overstimulate the general immune defenses, which has its own set of dangers.
yea imprinting is definitely at play here.
and yet we allow illegal aliens to flood across the border with no covid test. actual citizens are treated worse than criminals sneaking across the border.
Actual citizens are just not as pitifully cute as illegal aliens.
Seriously. For many Americans, the primary purpose of government is to address what they perceive as human needs based on measures of pity. Their (and our) tax dollars then buy indulgences of compassion.
and yet we allow illegal aliens to flood across the border with no covid test.
That’s ok. The cholera and yellow fever they’re bringing dwarfs any covid they have.
and all the drugs they bring too. we need to seal the border, stop the flow. build a wall and only allow legal immigrants across. period.
How does this make any sense? Covid has become globally endemic.
It probably makes sense to just avoid international travel until this ridiculous rule is rescinded.
We were scheduled to visit relatives in Europe in August 2020, our first trip in five years, primarily to see a few elderly relatives with whom I’m very close. They are in good health, but approaching their late 80s. Time is ticking.
Obviously, that trip didn’t happen.
They ask every month when we plan to come back, and at this point I can only answer: if/when this nonsense ends.
It made no sense as soon as we realized that it was already everywhere. Which was sometime in March 2020.
Fuck all of the assholes making these rules. It is obvious they are pointless rules at this point. The only possibility left is that these people are assholes.
Alameda County (Oakland) just began requiring indoor masking again; up-tick in hospitalizations.
Numbers? We don’t need no steenking numbers!
Numbers are racist. And math is hard.
Man, you hit that one dead on.
Wait. I should probably explain.
I live in CA. And, that is the mentality I encounter on a daily basis. Sadly, it’s the majority opinion as well.
I said this two years ago that the govt would never give back some of the power they took. They can’t help themselves. It’s in their blood.
Remember the golden age of comics when they sometimes included PSAs?
Apparently the CDC is recommending masks on planes as a way to combat Monkeypox. I don’t know about you but I’ve always been incredibly careful about which dicks I suck in the airplane lavatory.
Seriously though. It doesn’t get much more Health Theater than that. Are they afraid people will run an infected person’s open sores in their mouth? Monkeypox doesn’t travel through the air!
“Monkeypox doesn’t travel through the air!”
One wouldn’t know that based on the tone of most alarmist articles about it right now. The actual transmission mechanism is barely mentioned, let alone the association with, promiscuous, gay men.
This is AIDs all over again.
Just for grins, what is one’s liability if they give an infectious disease to someone who then perishes?
Depends on knowledge, intent, caution…..and the attorneys involved.
This has been hashed out in court before.
Like I said, AIDS all over again.