After the outbreak of the new variant of the omicron variant in the United States, The US Government immediately took strict measures regarding the traveling rules and regulations and banned travel from South Africa and its seven neighboring countries where the cases shoot up in just less than 3 days.
The White House Announced Travel Ban On Eight South African Countries
As per the restrictions, the US Citizens or non-citizens who were residing in these eight countries were not permitted to enter the borders, and only after negative test reports they were allied.
This was done to prevent the spread of the virus and protect people from infection as much as possible and It was expected by the Government that travel restrictions would lead to delay in the cases in the US but within one week the omicron variant was found in California on 1st December and since that day the cases have increased to more than 73 percent of the total cases in the US.
Now per the latest development and push from the aviation companies has led to forcing the government to lift the ban on the 8 countries which includes, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Malawi, Namibia, and Mozambique.
The news was announced by the White House assistant press secretary, Kevin Munoz, via his official Twitter account and the lift will come into effect from December 31. Many people claimed that it was necessary to do so because other countries were also lifting the ban on these 8 countries
According to President Joe Biden, the travel ban was a way to analyze the situations and prepare themselves for the coming attacks. It helped to observe how much time omicron took to hit the country and what health experts and administration could possibly do to avoid facing the worst situations.
On the other hand, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have a different approach towards the situation. They still ask people to avoid traveling to these countries as they are a hub of variants and hold a comparatively high COVID infection rate.
Also, some airlines have canceled a lot of flights on the occasion of New Year and Christmas to avoid excess gathering of people and didn’t want to be the epicenter for the outbreak. People find it difficult to catch their last-minute flights and have got stuck where they were.
It is expected that more than 500 flights were canceled and thousands of people were isolated on Christmas day to curb the cases.
With the spread of the omicron variant, the demand to increase the number of potential health workers at public health centers also increased. The time period for isolation of health care staff has received some relaxation in order to manage the staff shortage at hospitals.
The infected workers can get back to work within 7 days instead of 10 days after testing negative and bearing no symptoms at all and in some cases, if there are no symptoms then it might further cut short to 5 days!
