Pakistan screened us for coronavirus. Nobody checked us when we got back to JFK.
March 25, 2020 at 6:42 p.m. GMT
“Are you guys being quarantined?” asked one friend after another after my husband and I arrived back in Washington this past weekend from an eight-day trip to Pakistan.
In fact, while we’ve decided to self-quarantine for two weeks out of concern about the covid-19 pandemic, no government official ever told us to do so — it just seemed like the right thing to do. Nor did we receive any sort of screening at the airport when we returned to the United States, despite flying into New York — the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, with over 25,000 reported cases and more than 200 deaths as I write this.
The disconnect between the illness’s mounting human toll and this seemingly lax approach to incoming international air passengers has opened our eyes to the federal government’s insufficient response to the coronavirus and caused us to ask why our country, with its vast resources, seemingly can’t — or won’t — take the coronavirus as seriously as it should.
When we arrived in Pakistan on March 13, we each underwent a temperature scan at the Islamabad airport. We also had to fill out a form asking if we’d been in China or Iran, two countries hit hard by covid-19, during the previous 14 days. We were asked to check boxes indicating if we had a fever, cough or shortness of breath. Though 2 a.m. was probably a low-traffic arrival time, it was a painless, organized process, not a major inconvenience.
So we were shocked when we arrived Saturday at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to discover that no covid-19 screening measures or advisories about quarantining awaited us. We simply got off the plane and proceeded to the U.S. citizens’ line, as if returning from any normal overseas trip. We did our customs declaration (Are you bringing in any food?) at an electronic kiosk. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer who scanned our passports (and who was wearing gloves) asked us a couple of questions about where we’d been and what we’d done in Pakistan. My husband was kept back for a few minutes of additional questioning, which appeared to be motivated more by security concerns than health. No one said a word about quarantines.
Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/25/coronavirus-quarantine-new-york-pakistan-airport/
March 25, 2020 at 6:42 p.m. GMT
“Are you guys being quarantined?” asked one friend after another after my husband and I arrived back in Washington this past weekend from an eight-day trip to Pakistan.
In fact, while we’ve decided to self-quarantine for two weeks out of concern about the covid-19 pandemic, no government official ever told us to do so — it just seemed like the right thing to do. Nor did we receive any sort of screening at the airport when we returned to the United States, despite flying into New York — the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, with over 25,000 reported cases and more than 200 deaths as I write this.
The disconnect between the illness’s mounting human toll and this seemingly lax approach to incoming international air passengers has opened our eyes to the federal government’s insufficient response to the coronavirus and caused us to ask why our country, with its vast resources, seemingly can’t — or won’t — take the coronavirus as seriously as it should.
When we arrived in Pakistan on March 13, we each underwent a temperature scan at the Islamabad airport. We also had to fill out a form asking if we’d been in China or Iran, two countries hit hard by covid-19, during the previous 14 days. We were asked to check boxes indicating if we had a fever, cough or shortness of breath. Though 2 a.m. was probably a low-traffic arrival time, it was a painless, organized process, not a major inconvenience.
So we were shocked when we arrived Saturday at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to discover that no covid-19 screening measures or advisories about quarantining awaited us. We simply got off the plane and proceeded to the U.S. citizens’ line, as if returning from any normal overseas trip. We did our customs declaration (Are you bringing in any food?) at an electronic kiosk. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer who scanned our passports (and who was wearing gloves) asked us a couple of questions about where we’d been and what we’d done in Pakistan. My husband was kept back for a few minutes of additional questioning, which appeared to be motivated more by security concerns than health. No one said a word about quarantines.
Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/25/coronavirus-quarantine-new-york-pakistan-airport/