>I'm totally ok with covid19 positive Canadians being stuck an unable to return home until they test negative.
I am not; your home country should never deny you entry. You're telling a citizen he is not welcome in his own country, is that how you want to treat your citizens?
Quarantine is warranted but denying entry has a weird taste to me
It's an imperfect solution. But thousands of people have left to the beach in Mexico, Florida, etc. We aren't talking of people that got surprised by COVID in March, we are talking of people that bought a plane ticket in the middle of the pandemic, traveled abroad for vacation, and are now inconvenienced by the fact they need to get tested to come back.
I'm also in the same situation with my home country. I was born there, has the country passport, don't mind 2 week quarantine, commercial airlines have expressed interest but they are simply not allowed. Only a pitiful amount of repatriation flights are done.
I can't believe it's harder to go back to my home country than to get a visa to the US. I'm lucky I can stay long-ish term in the US but many many others are screwed.
I understand the country is underequipped to deal with a lot of people coming back and it's better to protect many more people inside but I do feel forgotten sometimes. What's the point of having the citizenship then if I can't even come home?
I’m assuming this is Vietnam as I have friends going through the same issue. Citizens of Vietnam and they are on a 6-9 month waiting list for a repatriation flight with the gov’t basically saying “if you can stay where you are you can’t come here”.
They can’t even even pay for a commercial flights and quarantine like other countries.
And because Lunar New Year celebrations are coming up, repatriations flights have been cancelled until after as they are concerned with all the travel within the country.
There's a big problem of Vietnamese who are stranded and jobless in Japan -- they lost their (mostly travel-related) jobs, cannot pay tuition, and cannot return home:
I guess the situation with Vietnam is more unique that I thought.
This is an unrelated rant since the absurdity of the situation got to me. If you can hear the rumors about the reasons why there are fewer repatriation flights in January though, it definitely takes the cake.
I am terrified of the possibility of this being retained after the pandemic and expanded to cover other maladies. There already is a concept called medical inadmissibility, but it only applies to foreign nationals. It really concerns me that we are not applying it to Canadians as well.
There are labs that guarantee < 72-hour turnaround times for travel. It costs extra but hey, that's life. This pandemic has been around for a year now so if it was that important to travel, it's worth paying extra for the test.
Not every place in the world is going to have PCR tests with results in a 72 hour window. There are going to be lots of Canadians falling through the cracks.
The 30 minute tests are antigen tests. The 72 hour tests are PCR tests. Antigen tests can basically only detect the virus if you're currently contagious. PCR tests can detect the virus before and after you're contagious. Airlines typically require the 72 hour PCR tests.
I don't think you need an 8 ball to predict that you shouldn't travel during this global pandemic -- especially in the past 6 months when it's all hit the fan.
Now they are in countries in the Caribbean that have managed the virus relatively well and are overloading their public health system because they urgently need tests. Canada is just creating a problem for poorer countries while gaining very little - there's barely any community spread. If a Canadian returns home from the Carribean, on average both countries will have less covid.
Governments has been telling people for months not to go on vacation, that is correct, they should have thought of that before leaving.
They also gave 2 weeks notice so if you went somewhere and didn't think you could get a COVID test, there was still time to make it back home before the ban started.
If only these people would suffer that would be alright - it was their mistake. But rich countries should not make poorer countries pay for the bad decisions of their own citizens. Policy needs to be guided by data, not emotions.
Keep in mind individuals can test positive for months after being infected but are not at risk for spreading the virus. It really should be a negative test or 14+ days after a positive test.
my friend's father passed away from covid three weeks after contracting it at a curling tournament which they obviously shouldn't have held, even in a small town in the middle of nowhere. he was 65 years old and had just retired. being dead is also not cool.
Only 2% of cases are coming from outside of the country, so this seems mostly like a political thing than actually being useful. There's a lot of lower hanging fruit to get a 2% reduction. This seems too heavy handed in places where it's not currently possible to do a 72 hour test.
At the very least give some options to those can't meet the requirement. These people have to quarantine two weeks after returning anyway - I just don't see the logic behind this move.
> These people have to quarantine two weeks after returning anyway - I just don't see the logic behind this move.
Well, presumably a lot of the people taking foreign holidays are covid sceptics. So expecting 100% compliance with all quarantine rules would be pretty naive.
But people are getting stuck because they can't get results back in the 72 hour window. That's really not cool.