The U.S. CDC is warning Americans against traveling to countries with lower Covid risk than the U.S., while the WHO overlooks a surge in former Soviet states

(Originally published Sept. 2 in “What in the World“) The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken the sensible step of recommending that unvaccinated Americans not travel this weekend, a three-day weekend celebrating the largely defeated U.S. labor movement. The advice comes as a surge in infections by the Delta strain of Covid-19 worsens, killing ever-more Americans and stretching the country’s healthcare system, including supplies of oxygen and ventilators, to the limit. Tests of a new oral treatment for Covid are underway.

The CDC’s recommendation is rather weak tea. While curbing travel by the unvaccinated might help them avoid infection, it will do little to stop vaccinated people from spreading the delta strain more widely. What the U.S.—and the world—needs is a complete, 2-week lockdown like the kind New Zealand is implementing in response to its latest outbreak. Without one, we risk allowing the delta strain to achieve more breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, who though they may not become severely ill, may still risk long-term ill effects, including kidney damage. Worse, mild or even asymptomatic infections may allow the delta strain to use its unsuspecting vaccinated victims to mutate into something new and potentially more dangerous, like the new “mu” variant.

The CDC also had the audacity to raise its advisories against travel by Americans to Azerbaijan, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Moldova, North Macedonia, Saint Lucia, and Switzerland due to what it warned were high levels of Covid infection. Yet all of these countries save one, Saint Lucia, have lower infection rates than the United States. The U.S. remains one of the 15 most dangerous countries in which to travel if you hope to avoid Covid, behind Botswana and just a whisker ahead of North Macedonia.

And three of the countries the CDC warned about—Canada, Germany and Switzerland—have vaccinated at least as many of their residents as the U.S.

Thus, their populations are more protected against infected Americans than Americans in the U.S. Americans should arguably be encouraged to escape to Canada, Germany or Switzerland.

The good news is that more U.S. universities and colleges are requiring students to be vaccinated, which should further boost the U.S. vaccination rate. But Asia’s continued failure to accelerate vaccinations has created a global supply-chain bottleneck, as factory activity is hit by the kind of lockdowns that worked against earlier strains, only to be relaxed in time for the arrival of the more contagious delta strain. The impact on Malaysia, which is battling one of the world’s most intense surges in infections, is particularly severe.

And though the World Health Organization is calling for more donations of vaccines for South America and the Caribbean, it should probably be calling for those doses to be shipped to eastern Europe, the Caucasus and the Middle East, where vaccination rates are low and infection rates are among the world’s highest.