Fauci: Case involves traveler from South Africa
Blanket travel bans may be unfairly applied and likely will not completely prevent the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, World Health Organization leaders said Wednesday.
“I thank Botswana and South Africa for detecting, sequencing, and reporting this variant so rapidly,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in his opening remarks at a news conference Wednesday.
“It’s deeply concerning to me that those countries are now being penalized by others for doing the right thing. We call on all countries to take rational, proportional risk reduction measures in keeping with international health regulations,” the director-general said.
“We do not want to see countries penalized for sharing information, because this is how WHO and our partners, this is how we make assessments and how we provide advice,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19.
Van Kerkhove said some travel bans have limited the ability of South African researchers to ship virus samples out of the country, “so there are other implications for these travel bans that are out there.”
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, said travel bans contain “internal contradictions” that don’t accurately address how the virus spreads.
“There’s also some inherent internal contradictions in these bans. We’ve seen these before where you ban flights except for your own citizens. I mean, epidemiologically, I find it hard to understand the principle there,” he said.
“Is that that some passport holders will have the virus and some won’t? Does the virus read your passport? Does the virus know your nationality or where you’re legally resident?” he added.
Ryan also criticized the inconsistent application of travel bans, pointing out that there are countries currently under a ban who have not yet had a case of Omicron, “and other countries with confirmed cases and evidence of local transmission with no travel bans.”
“So I’m not saying one is right or one is wrong, what I’m saying is I can’t see the logic, certainly from a public health or an epidemiologic perspective,” he said.
