The recent discovery of a new COVID-19 variant, Omicron, in southern Africa has prompted swift and crippling travel bans and restrictions on the region that many experts believe will ultimately do more harm than good. While there's certainly much to learn about Omicron, regressing back to closed borders promises to be counterproductive.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently cautioned against travel bans, with the regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti noting that "travel restrictions may play a role in slightly reducing the spread of COVID-19 but place a heavy burden on lives and livelihoods."
Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute of Global Health, told NPR that "there is very little utility of these kinds of bans. Unfortunately, from what we know about the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 and the epidemiology of this variant, the horse has probably left the barn."
The Omicron variant has already been reported in other parts of the world, including Europe, Asia and North America. "If the question is to prevent the variant from coming in, it really doesn't make sense to exempt countries where it has been identified and that have even more direct flights than southern Africa," added Omer.
The negative impact of travel bans is obvious from an economic standpoint but researchers have also warned that they can provide a false sense that the virus is being contained and can lead to less scientific transparency as health officials must be wary of disclosing information that could potentially prompt harmful travel restrictions.
"I've never understood travel bans. As I've said from the beginning, they haven't worked. When we first implemented travel bans on China and this virus came in from southern Europe to ignite our New York epidemic. They haven't worked," Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, told Derek Thompson on the Plain English podcast. "Maybe some exceptions are some of the island nations like New Zealand and Australia but overwhelmingly for North America, South America and Europe, they've not worked."
Enacting travel restrictions creates an illusion of safety but without enhanced COVID-19 testing, mask enforcement and vaccination efforts do little to combat the spread of the virus.
"This virus spreads too quickly. I don't understand the logic. I think part of it may be optics, that global leaders want to show that they're doing something and looking out after their populations. I think ultimately it's self-defeating because it's counterproductive. It makes it harder to work with affected countries, it's expensive and drains resources from organizations to implement travel bans when what we really should be doing is helping the affected countries where Omicron potentially originated," Hotez added.
The World Travel & Tourism Council is in agreement that travel bans are a poor initial response to Omicron. "WTTC supports the WHO position in calling for borders to remain open and safe travel to continue. Closing borders will not prevent the spread of new variants. The latest variant is increasingly being detected in countries around the world. The way to keep safe is to focus on the vaccination status of individual travelers rather than placing whole countries onto red lists," Julia Simpson, WTTC President & CEO, said in a statement.
"Rather than stigmatizing countries such as South Africa, which rely heavily on strong travel and tourism, we should be applauding them for identifying this new variant so quickly. Until we fully understand this new variant we must focus on prioritizing the world distribution of vaccines while adopting sensible measures such as wearing masks."
It's been nearly two years since WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic and as the virus evolves so must our ways of combating it.
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