Originally Posted by Nayef

I hope this doesn’t cause more infections on planes especially since masks aren’t required on most flights to and from the US and most US airports. If my dad hadn’t tested the day of their travel as required he was potentially going to infect a lot of people on their flight.

Originally Posted by FlyingfromDC

Statistically, on an aircraft of 300 people there is likely to be someone with the infection. That’s the downside of the removal of testing requirement. I hope I’m wrong, and fingers crossed.

Originally Posted by Nayef

I’d understand removing the test mandate if masks/vaccines had still been required (like Canada) but this is going to be incredibly risky especially since US citizens and permanent residents among others aren’t required to be vaccinated. And of course with vaccination infections can and do happen. Covid cases are up probably because people now are a lot less inclined to take masking and being around crowds seriously and many are still getting severely ill and hospitalized though thankfully not as badly as pre-vaccines.

Originally Posted by richarddd

I believe part of the rationale is that there are no such requirements for domestic flights or just about any other activities in the US. Yes, international flights would be somewhat safer, but why should they be different from everything else? You may say we should be doing more to reduce transmission, but hard to see why these flights should be the priority.

Another part of the rationale may have been to prevent new strains or masses of infected people from entering the US, but given the prevalence in the US that doesn't make sense anymore, if it ever did.