I don't have any inside info or any better insight than most here, but one interesting nugget I caught from an interview with Delta (the airline, not variant
) CEO Ed Bastian two days ago during the Q2 2021 earnings announcement was that the US Administration was focused on getting the US vaccination rates up further before opening travel back up to the banned countries. As to the illogical exclusion of the EU/Schengen area (now with similar infection rates as the US), I think it's just convenient that these countries are already banned so it's much easier to keep them that way while vaccination rates in the US are still not where they want them to be, rather than sift through a list of countries and decide that country A should now be on, or country B should be off, etc.