Yellowjj

I don't people would enjoy being bombarded with questions, as well as having to fill out a form to establish your identity every time they wanted to fly without id. Not to mention the decision still lies with TSA whether they accept your claim of who you are and allow you to pass through. So yeah...

lhrhappy

When push comes to shove, as long as you're not a jerk, they'll let you fly. Because they don't want to have to answer the legal question of whether they have the right to demand your ID as a condition of flying.

JNelson113

I know, it was more to point out that it's somewhat an issue of population density given our relative populations to land size. I should have made that more clear. But this whole thing is somewhat off topic so I'll leave it there.

i0wnj00

This is overkill for domestic use, I think HEPA filters, air re-circulation and masks are good enough to reduce the risk of covid 19 and this could reduce demand which means are airlines end up asking for more money. I think the rule for arrivals for international travelers makes sense because the premise of doing so is to prevent the introduction of new variants and save hospital resources for people living in the country.

GUWonder

A rapid antigen test of sort works to fly from abroad to the US. That's at least a sign that the US would also accept the same kind of rapid antigen tests for domestic flights and not limit acceptable tests to just PCR tests. PCR test results take long enough to get back that the burden from testing is way less when antigen tests of sort are accepted than when it's just PCR tests that are accepted.

When was the last time you flew without showing physical ID for a domestic flight on a US common carrier?

The USG still makes US citizens identify themselves to clear the TSA TDC and even then subjects such travelers to an identification charade along with a possible attestation where willful misrepresentation about the ID is not without its perils. The USG also makes it a requirement for the US-serving carriers to have rules about passenger identification. Both the direct and indirect approaches regulate the conditions for travel by ticketed passengers on common carrier flights. Much the same kind of thing with a direct and indirect approach to regulate the conditions for travel by ticketed passengers on common carrier flights can be done with a domestic flight Covid-19 testing requirement.

zombietooth

As a requirement of my work, I have to take a PCR test a couple days prior to travel and another on arrival at my destination before I start my work. I've had to pay as high as $500- for a PCR test (which are not covered by Bronze Obamacare plans), and spent around $3,500- total last year just for PCR testing. In addition, I've had the bad luck of having several false positives. I know they were false positives because I was asymptomatic and re-tested negative 3-6 days later.

teddybear99

That blog post was from 12 years ago in 2008. A lot has changed since then, so it is a moot point.

Guate87

Some reasons this policy is not based on science but on Chicken Little "do something to create a false sense of security" bluster (think of the TSA):

1-People who have received both vaccine shots will still have to test.
2-You can test negative at a clinic and get infected one second later at that same clinic, then infect everyone when you go to the airport a couple days later and board the plane.
3-Mail-in tests. (I can swab my son and send it in as mine. No one will ever question if the sender and swabee are identical).
4-The WHO says the false negative rate for PCR and molecular tests is high.
5-United and the DOD have reported the risk of infection while flying is nearly 0%.
6-There have been Zero confirmed cases of confirmed Covid transmission on a domestic US flight since April.

I have friends and relatives who tested negative on PCRs and molecular tests but were put in Covid wards in hospitals because, clinically, they had Covid.

TTT

Recent airplane transmission study from NZ, which is well suited to conduct these:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/3/20-4714_article

Dublin_rfk

Don’t bet on it! That would take a little bit of effort to make sense and they have not show any interest in doing any more than take the easy way out a screw everyone.

If you really believe that I have a bridge for sale. Throughout the last one hundred years U.S politicians have voted themselves exempt from the everyday laws and mandates they pass. Two glaring examples are the congressional retirement plan and their medical plan. If you believe either of them aren’t special cut outs see my first statement.

GUWonder

Then you have a bridge for sale, even as I have no current need to buy a bridge of any sort.

The fact of the matter is that US legislators and US diplomats flying to the US on common carriers are not exempted from the Covid-19 testing requirements any more or less than you would be on an ordinary passport. The US diplomats flying back to the US has already happened. Just waiting to see who will be the first US legislator to fly back to the US on a common carrier after this CDC testing requirement went into place.

Foreign diplomats flying to the US on common carriers are also meeting this US requirement, even as they generally can't be prosecuted were they to present false test results and lie on the US attestation form.

I've been around DC long enough to know quite the bit of history about Congress "exempting itself" from a litany of laws applicable to others. But good luck finding a Congress today willing and able to exempt itself from a Covid-19 testing requirement to fly commercially this year. I am certain such exemption language won't even make it to the President's desk.

Would some US legislators try to use the "I'm on my way to/from work" constitutional privilege to try to run circles around such a testing restriction on domestic flights? Well, given everything else seen this year at the Capitol, I wouldn't be surprised if that too was attempted by some of the legislators. Congressional immunity from arrest doesn't apply to arrests for treason, breach of the peace or felony.

PaulMSN

Vietnam has 29% of the population of the US and 3% of the land mass, and they are doing better than both Norway and Finland.

zombietooth

Evidently, it isn't testing that's making the difference since Vietnam is rated 174th in the world for testing at ~15K tests per million.

Japan, with a similarly low death rate but a denser population, is 146th in the world for testing at ~53K tests per million, with a very low death rate of 43 per million.

The US is 19th in the world for testing at ~926K per million and our death rate is 11th in the world at 1,341 per million.

ryman554

This is correct. Vaccination means you won't get "too sick", if you look at the data. It does not mean (see, for example, today's J&J vacciine results) that you can't get infected. Ironically, it appears as if being vaccinated means you are more likely to be asymptomatic, which is the bigger problem with COVID and this pandemic, in general. If there weren't the asymptomatic spreaders, (unlike in SARS, MERS, ....), we'd have a big leg up on this bloody thing and we wouldn't be in the mess we are in. While it seems reasonable that being vaccinated makes you less likely to be transmissible, something I agree with, by the way, we currently do not have the data to say that. So, yes, this is one case where we really are "following the science". I hope there is clarity on this in the very near future.

This is also true. However, when infected, the science indicates that it takes something like 3 days to become significantly infectious, and you are most infectious 3-7 days into the disease. So, the 72 hour thing is really only good at minimizing impact while traveling, not minimizing impact at your destination. So, again, we're following science by about 50% here. Add on a quarantine / test out after 3-5 days, and you would be at 100% science, if the goal was to eliminate travel as a mechanism of COVID spread.

That last part is the problem. I had though PCR tests false negatives were quite rare, and it was the false positives that were high. Ah well.....

Guate87

The title of this thread is "Potential negative test for US domestic travel" so I assumed everyone was talking about US domestic travel. You cited non-US travel.

There are ZERO proven cases of Covid transmission on US domestic flights, which is one reason that testing should not be mandated for domestic flights. "If it ain't broke..."

One friend, a US Army veteran, was tested 8 times while he was in the VA Hospital. Every PCR and molecular test was negative. He was admitted because, clinically, he had the 11 symptoms of Covid listed on the CDC website.

When were you last in Vietnam? I left on March 17, 2020, on the last international flight out of the country. Vietnam put me and every other arriving passenger in quarantine, tested us, then released us into the population. To this day I have not been contacted by text, email or the app the Vietnamese government made us download, ostensibly for contact tracing purposes.

Do you believe the Vietnamese government's data? When I was there in March, Vietnam said they only had 26 cases, all recovered. Then, the IMF offered millions of dollars to countries with active Covid cases and, magically, Vietnam found thousands of active Covid cases. So, we foreigners were rounded up, quarantined and tested, because Vietnam wanted to act like only inbound passengers had active Covid.

Do you also believe China's data?