After more than two and-a-half years of strict COVID-19 controls, the government of Hong Kong says it’s putting an end to mandatory quarantine rules for international travellers. CNN reports that under rules that come into play on Monday, September 26, incoming travellers will be required to undergo three days of self-monitoring on arrival. Travellers will not be allowed to visit certain places during that period, including restaurants and bars. They’ll also have to take PCR tests on days, two, four and six after arriving, followed by another rapid antigen test. It’s still a fair bit of control, but it’s a Read more
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Travellers coming into Canada by the land border can benefit from a one-time exemption if they forget to submit their information through the ArriveCan application, the National Post reports. Ottawa quietly made the change in May for Canadian citizens and permanent residents, and extended it to all foreign nationals, including American citizens, at the end of the month of July, confirmed the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) on Friday. CBSA spokesperson Judith Gadbois-St-Cyr told the Post the measures are “temporary” for fully vaccinated travellers and that the rules were changed to “provide more flexibility” to those “who may have been Read more
Canada’s restrictions on international travel drastically reduced the number of COVID-19 cases entering the country during the first waves of the pandemic but were insufficient to prevent new outbreaks, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers. The study, published today in eLife, used publicly available viral genome sequences to create a detailed timeline of how the virus was entering Canada from January 2020 to March 2021, and the resulting chains of transmission. The genomic data was used to identify the geographic origin of COVID-19 cases, enabling the identification of 2,263 instances where COVID-19 was imported into Read more
Hong Kong is ending it’s two-year ban on visits from Canadians, Americans and British residents, and also slashing its quarantine requirement. The city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, announced during a press conference Monday that Hong Kong on April 1 will lift flight bans on nine countries, including Canada, Britain, Australia, India and the U.S., as well as reduce quarantine times at special hotels from 14 days to seven. Travellers would have to test negative for COVID-19 on the sixth and seventh day of quarantine to end their isolation before 14 days. In addition, all visitors to Hong Kong must be Read more
Starting today (Feb. 28), fully vaccinated travellers no longer have to take a PCR-style test to enter Canada. Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos last week announced that travellers will still be required to take a pre-arrival test before entering Canada. But the Trudeau government now will allow fully vaccinated Canadians and foreign visitors to provide results from a rapid antigen test, which can be purchased more easily than PCR or molecular-style tests, and are a fraction of the cost. The government initially said rapid tests will have to be taken with 24 hours of a scheduled departure to Canada or Read more
