N1120A

American Airlines isn't going to let you board any flight to the US from outside the US without a test. If you arrive at YYZ on some airline without going through the US, then cross the land border, you don't need a test. Why on earth would you go through all this?

dshafiee

It is a bit of joke, however. Was up there this week and my colleague was randomly selected. We were leaving the next day but the test results take 3-5 days!

GloballyServiced

Any idea how meticulously they check vaccine papers for entry on the land boarder for foreigners? I am hoping that requirement is removed or relaxed so this person doesn't need to sit in Mexico for a month getting more vaccines.

boerne

The person who represents themselves in court has a fool for a lawyer and a fool for a client. As these people are doing.

I’m in a group of 14 who filed six lawsuits against the Transportation Security Administration for illegally enforcing a mask mandate (the lead case is Wall v. TSA). Our cases started in six circuits of the U.S. Courts of Appeals and are now in the District of Columbia Circuit. Membes of our coalition are also suing to vacate CDC’s mask mandate and testing requiremen as well as airlines’ discriminatory mask policies. Each plaintiff is representing him/herself. We do not have an attorney.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/30/lawyer/

sfgiants13

As much as I want to see this stupid policy gone good luck beating the government representing yourself

84fiero

oh my! lol well we won't count on this case then.

venk

Technically, you are not being denied entry into US but prevented from taking that mode of transportation into the US. If you want to swim across the pond, they will let you in.

Note that airlines themselves have always had the right to deny you boarding for any signs of infectious diseases. Or even for being too drunk.

Even the anti-mask advocates claim to not fly voluntarily if they were Covid positive, so I don’t see a problem here unless that claim was just virtue signaling.

Logistically, as long as there are contact tracing procedures in place, it uses up resources if a passenger were to develop Covid after arrival. Allowing without testing has an increased chance of use of such resources.

Like everything, this is also political. Most outbreak spreads are related to international air travel and if there were to be a future surge, there will be political talking points in retrospect.

Covid has a lot of enablers in the population.

GrayAnderson

Well, and if there are no contact procedures in place (which seems to be an issue as well), that's another problem. The number of folks testing negative pre-departure and then positive post-flight (whether because of testing thresholds or testing fraud...and I think there's a reason to suspect at least some of the latter issue on the part of testing companies) is an issue.

N1120A

Comments like that have similar intellectual weight to the MDFL decision on the mask mandate. Swimming across the ocean to the US is physically impossible, making such a denial of entry.

GrayAnderson

The comment arguably does as phrased. A better point would be that the combination of a lack of a testing requirement to enter Canada or Mexico plus the lack of a requirement to enter the US by land makes defeating the test-to-fly requirement quite easy.

[The fact that the requirement applies to a YUL-JFK flight but not a JFK-HNL flight also makes the logic somewhat suspect except as, at best, a "target of opportunity".]

Edit: Also, just to be a prat, but swimming across the St. Lawrence River, while legally fraught, is definitely doable in places by a good swimmer with a wetsuit in the right weather who doesn't mind "landing" a bit downstream from where they started. There are definitely places this doesn't apply, but also places where it would.

venk

Perhaps, the distinction between intent and consequence is too nuanced despite the hyperbolic humor to illustrate traveling alone vs traveling with others.

Placing travel restrictions on people with communicable diseases has been on the books forever.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/travel-restrictions.html

If you were infected with a communicable disease while abroad, being barred from travel might result in not being able to return to the US until the situation is remedied or alternate allowable means are used (medical evacuations, etc). I doubt anyone with would make the case that an Ebola patient or someone with TB is being denied entry to the US against that practice even if that is the consequences.

Covid is just a special case of this long-standing practice that is within the charter of CDC. Because of the ongoing pandemic nature (and its impact on the larger population), and the similarities of the symptoms with other simpler afflictions and so easily missed, the default is to put the traveller on the Do Not Board list until a negative test takes them off the list. There will be consequences for being infected until that state is taken care of. Again, almost everyone claims (at least publicly) that they would not travel if infected. So, I don’t see a problem with this practice unless one insists they must be allowed to travel in close proximity to others even if they are infected at the time.

Whether there is inconsistency or loopholes in this practice is a different matter that does not negate the intent.

I hope someone isn’t going to suspend the intellect to make a false equivalence of the above with “should be innocent until proven guilty” but that wouldn’t surprise me.

venk

False negatives are certainly far more likely with these tests than false positives. So, restricting those with a Covid positive result is part of the solution even if not the complete solution. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (i.e., not requiring a test) does not seem to be a good alternative policy for handling a pandemic.

A possible position is whether Covid infection should be treated as a serious communicable disease that should be prevented from infecting others or just ignored as similar to common cold. This is certainly more defensible than a denial of entry argument. Hopefully that becomes the state at some point but I don’t think we are there yet given lack of information on long covid consequences, the mutatability of the virus, etc.

GloballyServiced

Can you help clarify the logic for us on the required testing for international inbound flights while domestically the US has hundreds of thousands if not millions of cases circulating at all times? And then tie long covid into the story for us - how this testing is helping address long covid risks.

I'm always fascinated by bureaucracy trying to accomplish goals in completely nonsensical fashion.

paul21

It's not so much logic as it is legal restrictions. The federal government has some authority to restrict movements internationally, but interstate movement is mostly protected. It'd be up to individual airlines to impose a pre departure test to board, and then there's IDB rules etc., otherwise individual states can only impose a limited quarantine on arrival.

You're stating this as if some central medical authority decided it was best to test international arrivals and not domestic flights and therefore is a hypocrite or nonsensical. In practice this authority may have wanted both but could only secure one.

boerne

There is a Central Medical Authority. The CDC. They put out a weekly report called the MMWR that I have subscribed to for years, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/index.html But the CDC is or can be mired in politics. Very political 2016 to 2020, less so now it appears to me. So yes they likely went for the best deal they could make considering the authority wielders at the time, and now they are living with that decision. And that's not the only medical conflict in government. The Secret Service does not always agree with the White House Medical office concerning who should be on call when a principal visits anyplace out of DC. Hopefully its better now.