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MEdia

B.C. travel restrictions don't go far enough, says SFU researcher studying pandemics and borders

With dozens of flights still landing at Vancouver's international airport every day, a researcher studying how borders are managed during pandemics says the latest measures put in place to limit non-essential travel in B.C. don't go far enough. "We definitely welcomed the announcements, but it felt a little like two steps forward and one step back," said Simon Fraser University's Julianne Piper with the Pandemics and Borders Project.

Shut down travel in and out of Manitoba or risk prolonging pandemic, experts warn

With Manitoba health officials seeing more cases of the illness linked to non-essential travel, experts say more needs to be done to discourage it or risk prolonging the pandemic. Data shows air travel among Manitobans is still much lower than it was pre-pandemic, with only a few hundred passengers flying in and out of Winnipeg's airport each day, according to a spokesperson with the Winnipeg Airports Authority.

UMD School of Public Policy News

Catherine Worsnop Shares Her Research into Cross-Border Measures during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

The University of Maryland recently granted SPP Assistant Professor and CISSM Research Fellow Catherine Worsnop an Independent Scholarship, Research, and Creativity Award (ISRCA). The funding will support Worsnop’s book project, The Politics of Outbreak Response: The Evolution and Effectiveness of WHO’s International Health Regulations, which will expand on her dissertation research into state commitments and deviations from the WHO’s International Health Regulations.

CBC The National

What the most recent flight ban means for Canadians in India

As Canadians in India react to news they may now be stuck there for a month due to a ban on direct flights from India and Pakistan to Canada, one expert says the attempt to keep more cases of COVID-19 from being imported may not be good enough.

Bill Blair says Canada's borders have 'layers of protection.' An expert warns those layers have 'many holes'

There is a gold standard of border measures to curb COVID-19 — and Canada is not meeting it, said Kelley Lee, Canada research chair in global health governance at Simon Fraser University. "I'd say maybe Canada is like a bronze medal standard, possibly," she told Galloway. "We have a long list of exemptions, we have some loopholes to close, we have quarantine measures that need to be more strictly enforced."

Vietnam defied the experts and sealed its border to keep Covid-19 out. It worked.

As the pandemic took hold last year, travel restrictions quickly proliferated — they were the second-most-common policy governments adopted to combat Covid-19. According to one review, never in recorded history has global travel been curbed in “such an extreme manner”: a reduction of approximately 65 percent in the first half of 2020. More than a year later, as countries experiment with vaccine passports, travel bubbles, and a new round of measures to keep virus variants at bay, a maze of confusing, ever-changing restrictions remains firmly in place. But few countries have gone as far as Vietnam, a one-party communist state with a GDP per capita of $2,700.