Mitigation Measures
This article says that fully-vaccinated Americans/permanent residents will be able to come to Canada starting on 6 August 9 August; the rest of the world can come starting on 7 September. There are strings:
- Travellers must present evidence of gotten the full course of shots of some Canada-approved vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna, AZ, or J&J) at least 14 days before crossing the border.
- Travellers must use the ArriveCAN portal.
- Travellers must submit a PCR test from within the past 3 days.
- The border agents will do random PCR checks on arriving travellers.
- Because you might get called to a random PCR test and might fail it, everyone still has to have a quarantine plan.
- Children under 12 do not need to quarantine. They are advised to avoid group settings.
- Travellers still have to follow provincial and territorial public health orders. What if BC says you have to quarantine after entering BC if you have been outside of Canada in the past two weeks?
The government also announced that the border would open to the rest of the world on 7 September, if things went well.
I am a little concerned that there was no contingency plan mentioned for the US opening if the pandemic gets worse. For example, suppose a new variant Omega explodes in the US. Can we close the border again? Do we have the criteria for closing the border again?
Note that the US has not opened the border to Canadians yet for non-essential travel. They are thinking about it.
A very good question is why direct flights from the UK are still allowed, given that there are more confirmed cases per million in the UK right now than in India.
One obvious answer is racism; another possible answer is that the Canadian government does not believe the official Indian numbers. (This report used three different methods to estimate excess deaths, and estimates between 3.4M and 5M excess deaths, while the official number is about 400K.)
This article says that some cruise lines are not accepting passengers with mixed vaccines.