The decision by the European Council to remove the U.S. from
a safe list of countries for nonessential travel reverses advice that it gave
in June, when the bloc recommended lifting restrictions on U.S. travelers
before the summer tourism season.
The guidance is nonbinding, however, and U.S. travelers
should expect a mishmash of travel rules across the continent.
The EU has no unified COVID-19 tourism policy and national
EU governments have the authority to decide whether they keep their borders
open to U.S. tourists.
The EU also removed Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro and
North Macedonia from the safe travel list.
The United States has yet to reopen its own borders to EU
tourists, despite calls from the bloc for the Biden administration to lift its
ban.
The European Council updates the safe travel list based on
criteria relating to coronavirus infection levels. It gets reviewed every two
weeks. The threshold for being on the EU list is having not more than 75 new
COVID-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over the last 14 days.
Last week in the U.S. new coronavirus cases averaged over
152,000 a day, turning the clock back to the end of January, and the number of
hospitalized COVID-19 patients was around 85,000, a number not seen since early
February.
U.S. coronavirus deaths have been over 1,200 a day for
several days, seven times higher than they were in early July.
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