It is now been roughly a year since the Covid-19 pandemic started to affect most of our lives, having been spreading since late 2019. Sebastian published our first piece mentioning the virus on January 20th last year (access here).
It is now exactly a year when I had to change my flights and get into Japan three days earlier to enter before the country started to require quarantine (I made the cut-off by an hour), and later in that March they closed the border for most non-national arrivals.
China has had rigorous entry requirements in place since early 2020 with mandatory and lengthy quarantine at government-mandated hotels, including pre and post-arrival Covid-19 PCR-RT tests.
China now requires rather invasive anal swabs, performed at the airport, from all international arrivals. According to China, the virus is better identifiable from stool samples than from nose or throat swabs.
Canada instituted a mandatory three-night hotel quarantine for all arriving air passengers from last week (read more here) at select hotels (read more here). Simultaneously, some Canadians found out that it was cheaper to skip the hotel quarantine by paying a fine (read more here).
You must make and pay for three nights while waiting for the Covid-19 results from the test administered at the airport. The results come in a day, and if negative, you are free to leave and continue the 14-day quarantine at your residence.
Passengers arriving at London Heathrow yesterday faced immigration delays of up to seven hours, and there have been long delays frequently.
Heathrow Airport blames insufficient staffing at the Border Force due to Covid-19 prevention measurements to process the incoming passengers.
Many Australian states have welcomed arrivals from New Zealand even when the country itself (New Zealand) has required full quarantine for returning Kiwis.
Now, this arrangement from Australia’s side has come to a sudden end after a cluster of Covid-19 cases in Auckland.
It isn’t easy to believe that it was just four years ago when the mobile roaming within the European Union + Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein became free (Switzerland is not part of this program).
EU had already worked for 10 years by 2017 to reduce the roaming fees that member states travelers were facing when moving around in the common area until they were eliminated. EU is set to extend the free-roaming by 10 years when the current roaming rules are expiring on June 30, 2022.
European Commission has sent letters to Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden that have all restricted intra-Schengen travel, and countries have ten days to reply.
The commission doesn’t like the restriction of EU/EEA citizens’ movement that these countries have instituted violating the Schengen-agreement.
There was news coming out from the UK today that foreign travel may be allowed at the earliest after mid-May, but the ban is likely to last longer, perhaps until August.
Also, the question is, now that the UK is not part of the European Union, whether Schengen/EU/EEA countries are ready to welcome Brits who could further spread the more virulent variant of Covid-19 that is prevalent on the island.
China has made it even more difficult for select nationals to travel to China by requiring a pre-travel 14-day quarantine (not sure how this is supervised) and one or more pre-travel Covid-19 tests.
These travelers must go through the usual 14-day hotel quarantine upon entering China at their first port.
Canada has instituted a mandatory three-day hotel quarantine for all incoming passengers at the cost of roughly C$2,000 per person that begins tomorrow, February 22, 2021 (read more here).
Ottawa started to solicit hotels to be used as quarantine centers in early February (read more here) in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. The only cities that will continue to accept international arrival.
The news came out from Ottawa on Friday that the mandatory 72-hour hotel quarantine for all arriving air passengers would start on February 22, 2021.
Canadian Government was recently taking applications from hotels that would become quarantine centers (read more here) in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto & Montreal (only airports accepting international arrivals).
As global air travel has mostly collapsed outside of countries with large domestic networks and demand, airports, which have now mostly been privatized, have faced a significant drop in revenues.
Heathrow, owned mostly by foreign entities, had sought a fee hike worth £2.8bn but is now charging an extra £8.90 passenger “tax” due to lessened demand.
The French government has decided to kill the expansion project of CDG – Charles de Gaulle Airport usually referred to as Roissy, which has faced resistance on ecological grounds.
Terminal 4 would have increased the airport’s capacity by up to 40M passengers per year. The government told the Groupe ADP that it owns 50.6%, not to proceed with the project.
