La lobby di compagnie aeree, associazioni, settore del turismo americano ed europeo premono fortemente ai massimi livelli sul Presidente per rimuovere il tampone di ingresso in USA per i vaccinati.
Mr. Jeffrey Zients
White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. Zients:
On behalf of the many sectors of the travel and aviation industries, we urgently request that the Administration remove the requirement for pre-departure testing for vaccinated passengers traveling to the United States. Doing so is justified by the pervasiveness of COVID cases in all 50 states, increased immunity and higher vaccination rates as well as new treatments. Removing the requirement will greatly support the recovery of travel and aviation in the United States and globally without increasing the spread of COVID-19 and its variants.
The following factors strongly support the argument for removing the pre-departure testing requirement:
• As of today, more than 74.3 million people have had COVID in the U.S., meaning that at least 22 percent of the population has had the virus (though this figure is almost certainly an underestimate due to the number of asymptomatic infections and limited testing early in the pandemic). In December, the seven-day average for newly reported cases in the U.S. topped 700,000, 73 percent of which were the Omicron variant. Clearly COVID is widespread throughout the U.S. and
attempts to control its importation via air travel under today’s circumstances are unlikely to change that fact. No new threatening variants appear to be imminent, but if they were, pre-departure testing could be easily reinstituted.
• The European Union has recommended that its countries remove intra-Europe COVID travel restrictions and the United Kingdom has announced the removal of COVID pre-departure testing for vaccinated air travelers to enter the country.
The UK concluded that the cost to both passengers and airlines of the testing mandate could no longer be justified as there was no evidence the regime protected the population from COVID. This decision was supported by a January 5, 2022 study by Oxera and Edge Health that concluded when a variant is already highly prevalent in the domestic environment, travel restrictions are likely to have a very limited impact on the growth and the peak of cases and hospitalizations.1 This modelling result was replicated for Finland and Italy in a study released on February 1, 2022 which again found that
testing of travelers has virtually no impact on domestic infection rates.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that states consider a risk-based approach to the facilitation of international travel by lifting measures, such as testing and/or quarantine requirements, for individual travelers who are fully vaccinated, at least two weeks prior to traveling, with COVID-19 vaccines listed by the WHO for emergency use or approved by a stringent regulatory authority.
•
Surveys of air passengers indicate that pre-departure testing is a leading factor in the decision not to travel internationally. People simply are unwilling to take the chance that they will be unable to return to the U.S. at the end of their business trip or vacation. As a result, international travel in 2021 was 75 percent below 2019 levels.
We share the Administration’s commitment to getting as many people fully vaccinated and boosted as possible and believe removal of this impediment for vaccinated travel will further incentivize vaccinations. Travel and aviation’s recovery is dependent on the government taking steps to remove travel restrictions that are no longer justified by current circumstances.
1
https://50c9e2c4-52c0-446c-ba2a-d30...d/80447b_6dab44d1412d484fac87f93874d08444.pdf
2
https://www.iata.org/contentassets/...-report-travel-restrictions-italy-finland.pdf
Thank you for your consideration and we stand ready to work with you to implement this important step toward learning to live with COVID in a way that doesn’t compromise health and safety.
Respectfully,
WASHINGTON, February 2, 2022 — Airlines for America (A4A), the industry trade organization for the leading U.S. airlines, led a coalition of travel-industry groups urging U.S. health officials to remove the requirement for pre-departure testing for vaccinated passengers traveling to the United...
www.airlines.org
