En 24 horas? We’re about to be zipping through testing!
No sooner did we return home this week, the U.S. announced new stricter COVID testing rules given the emergence of the Omicron variant. The biggest change is that ALL passengers, regardless of vaccination status, are required to present a negative PCR test 24 hours before flying to the United States starting December 6, 2021. From a country that has publicly failed to implement effective COVID testing at the start of the pandemic, where only 60% of its population is fully vaccinated, and is not providing vaccines to other countries to stop the spread of COVID, the new entry rules are laughable. Don’t get us wrong – we support testing before entering a country. We want the travel industry to recover AND keep its workforce safe from COVID. We are afraid that the new 24-hour rule will discourage international travel, hurting the people that are employed through this industry the most.
And the unvaccinated are the ones to blame. If it wasn’t for the vaccine misinformation, the U.S. would have vaccinated faster and been able to spread the vaccines to the rest of the world faster. The faster we would have gotten the population of the world vaccinated, the less likely these variants would appear.
And we understand the recent spread of the Omicron variant has been by vaccinated travelers. But we shouldn’t be talking about the Delta and Omicron variants when we’ve had the vaccine for the past year. Fortunately these individuals are only suffering mild symptoms, and we wish for their speedy recovery. Hopefully, this variant will come and go, and the anti-vaxxers will reduce in numbers so that we can finally put this pandemic behind us.
As for us pandemic travelers, we will continue to travel. We will continue to test as needed. We will sacrifice the few seconds of nose discomfort to protect the people of the countries we are visiting. All within 24 hours! Alright, just means we have to set the alarms on our phone and plan to pay more for the tests and figure out where to go get tested.
Keep an ojo on the news, lets see if new changes will come. But in the meantime, can the rest of y’all FINALLY get vaccinated?
Latinos With Passports 