Originally Posted by
moondog
I agree, and in case it's not obvious, you're looking at forking over $7k (I tried to keep costs down, to the extent that I stayed with my friend in Mountain View instead of a hotel) at minimum in order to come here (add another $2k for the return flight, but this is easy).
Whether or not it's worth it is a personal/company decision.
ETA: I suppose it's possible for US people to pull off the drill for less than $5k, but if you set the benchmark at 7, you will be okay.
If you buy round trip from China and are OK with economy I think you can do it for less than $4k. I paid $2300 for my RT flight, $320 for my test to come back and the quarantine is 550rmb/night for 14 days which puts me right around the $3.9k usd mark. Not cheap by any means and I’m lucky to have my usa home in a departure city to China negating the need for the flight to and 2 days stay in the city before departure, but still not completely unreasonable considering I was usually dropping $3.5k on a RT biz ticket pre-Covid at least twice a year.
The real pain is the timesuck of the quarantine.