CDC: 15 New Countries Get ‘Avoid Travel’ Warning Due To Covid-19

Escaping the North American winter during the Covid-19 pandemic just got a bit trickier, as the United States put five popular Caribbean destinations and one Central American favorite on its ‘Avoid Travel’ list.

Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave 15 countries new Level 4 travel health notices, including the tropical islands of Jamaica, St. Barthelemy, St. Martin, Guadeloupe and the Dominican Republic as well as the nature lover’s paradise of Costa Rica.

The nine other countries with a newly raised warning are Colombia, Fiji, Kuwait, Mongolia, Niger, Peru, Romania, United Arab Emirates and Tunisia.

As the omicron variant blankets the globe, the CDC has raised three dozen countries to Level 4 in just the past several weeks. These 15 countries join last week’s 22 additions to the Level 4 list, compared with just two countries the week before that.

The highest of four risk categories, a Level 4 travel health notice signifies that a country is reporting more than 500 new Covid-19 infections per 28 days per 100,000 people. That level of infection is deemed to present a “very high” Covid-19 risk and Americans are warned to “avoid travel,” per CDC guidance.

The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), whose latest weekly epidemiological update tallied a whopping 18 million new cases around the world, a 20% increase, as compared to the previous week.

As of now, 116 countries around the world are at Level 4 on the CDC’s Covid risk map. That’s up from 88 just before the Christmas holidays.

Notably, many countries on the CDC’s map are experiencing lower levels of infection than the United States, which has also been shaded dark red for much of the pandemic. The U.S. is currently recording 223 new daily cases per 100,000 over a rolling seven-day average, according to the Covid-19 tracker from the Brown School of Public Health. That translates to over 6,000 new daily cases per 28 days per 100,000 people, which is more than 12 times the CDC’s threshold for Level 4 travel health notice.

Travel, and particularly international travel, does not appear to be a priority for most Americans right now. Amid rising Covid-19 cases worldwide, just under four in 10 Americans (39%) say they are comfortable flying domestically and only a quarter of Americans (26%) are comfortable with flying internationally, according to the most recent Morning Consult Return to Normal tracking survey. Overall, 55% of Americans say they are comfortable going on vacation right now, which is down 8 points since a mid-October survey. 

Unsurprisingly, confidence in traveling rises when the timeline is extended further into the year and presumably beyond the omicron wave. In a recent Tripadvisor/Ipsos survey, 68% of Americans said they are likely to travel domestically in 2022 (including road trips), compared to just 29% saying they are likely to travel overseas this year.