EU to reopen borders to visitors from 15 countries

WASHINGTON: The European Union reopened its borders Wednesday to visitors from 15 countries — but not the virusstricken United States, where a top health official warned the country is headed in the “wrong direction” as cases spike in multiple states.

US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said that the United States could see 100,000 new Covid-19 cases a day, and several US states imposed 14-day quarantines on travelers from other states.

In Brussels, the EU finalized the list of countries whose health situation was deemed safe enough to allow residents to enter the bloc starting yesterday.

Notably excluded were Russia and Brazil, as well as the United States, whose daily death toll passed 1,000 Tuesday for the first time since June 10.

The countries that made it onto the EU’s list are Algeria, Australia, Canada, Japan, Georgia, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and Uruguay.

Travelers from China, where the virus first emerged late last year, will be allowed on the condition that Beijing reciprocates and opens the door to EU residents.

The border relaxation, to be reviewed in two weeks and left to member states to implement, is a bid to help rescue the continent’s battered tourism sector, which has been choked by a ban on non-essential travel in place since mid-March.

But with some 10.4 million known infections worldwide, the pandemic is “not even close to being over,” the World Health Organization has warned.

In Washington, Fauci, a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, warned Congress that “clearly we are not in total control right now.”

“I would not be surprised if it goes up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around.”

Alarming spikes in Texas and Florida are driving the national total of new cases to over 40,000 per day, and they need to be tamped down quickly to avoid dangerous surges elsewhere in the country, Fauci stressed.

Texas alone reported 6,975 new cases of Covid-19 on Tuesday, its highest tally yet. The pandemic has claimed some 127,000 American lives so far and more than 508,000 around the globe.

The Pan American Health Organisation warned, meanwhile, that the coronavirus death toll in Latin America and the Caribbean could top 400,000 by October without stricter public health measures.

That would represent a quadrupling of the fatal cases of Covid-19 in the region.

— AFP photo A volunteer dressed in full protective gear gives directions to a woman at a walk-in Covid-19 test site in Los Angeles, California. The US will start combining test samples to be tested in batches, instead of one by one, hoping to dramatically boost screening for the coronavirus, as California passes the threshold of 6,000 coronavirus-related deaths three months after statewide Stay-At-Home orders went into effect to try and stem the virus.