US to issue Covid-19 travel warnings for 80 percent of countries

By ANA Reporter Last updated Apr 20, 2021

Washington has barred nearly all non-U.S. citizens who have recently been in most of Europe, China, Brazil, Iran and South Africa.

A young woman inside the airport — The U.S. A State Department said it will boost its “Do Not Travel” guidance to about 80% of countries worldwide, citing unprecedented risk to travellers from the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo:Anna Shvets/Pexels

PRETORIA, 20 May (ANA) – The US State Department has urged Americans to reconsider any international travel after indicating that it will issue warnings not to visit almost 80 percent of the world’s countries in an attempt to contain the spread of Covid-19, according to reports on Tuesday.

Broadcaster, Aljazeera reported that the department will start using Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) standards as it prepares health and safety guidelines for individual countries.

According to the report, the department did not reveal which countries would fall under which category. Guidance would be issued individually for each country in the coming week.

“The Covid-19 pandemic continues to pose unprecedented risks to travellers. In light of those risks, the Department of State strongly recommends US citizens reconsider all travel abroad,” the department was quoted saying in a statement.

CNBC said the State Department has already listed 34 out of about 200 countries as “Level 4: Do Not Travel,” which includes countries like Chad, Kosovo, Kenya, Brazil, Argentina, Haiti, Mozambique, Russia and Tanzania”.

About 130 more will be added to the list.

In the existing restriction, most Americans were already prevented from travelling to much of Europe.

The US broadcaster said Washington State has barred nearly all non-U.S. citizens who have recently been in most of Europe, China, Brazil, Iran and South Africa.

No timeline has been given for when the restrictions might be eased.

The Deutsche Welle (DW) said the US hasn’t had a global travel advisory warning in place since August, when guidance was revoked by the administration of former president Donald Trump.

To date, figures on real-time data portal Worldometer indicated that there has been at least 581,724 Covid-19 related deaths in the US, with over 32 million infections recorded.

– African News Agency (ANA), Editing by Devereaux Morkel