January 7, 2021

expert general comment on travel restrictions and COVID-19

A few journalists have asked us about this topic, so here is a general comment from Professor Mark Jit ahead of an expected government decision on whether international arrivals to the UK will be required to provide evidence of a recent negative coronavirus test.

Prof Mark Jit, Professor of Vaccine Epidemiology and Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:

“We modelled¹ people who might travel if there were no travel restrictions, and found that stopping international travellers from entering a country only made a difference in two situations.  One, if there are very few of new cases of COVID-19 happening in that country every day.  Or two, if the COVID-19 epidemic there is at the tipping point, i.e. it is just about to tip over into exponential growth.

“Now testing people and only allowing those who are negative to enter would have a similar impact, but possibly slightly smaller because there will be a few people who test negative even when they are positive.  So again this restriction will only make a difference in two situations: there are very few cases of COVID-19 happening, or the epidemic is close to its tipping point.

“These restrictions may also make a difference if you are trying to keep a new strain of coronavirus out of your country, and hardly anyone in your country has that strain yet.”

1 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30263-2/fulltext

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.