Canada to allow fully vaccinated Americans to cross border Aug. 9
Other international travellers can enter the country starting Sept. 7
The federal government’s plan to gradually reopen Canada to the rest of the world will relax measures some experts fear could leave the country vulnerable to new variants of COVID-19.
Under changes announced Monday, fully vaccinated U.S. citizens and permanent residents will be allowed to cross the land border for non-essential travel beginning Aug. 9 without having to quarantine.
Travellers will need to upload proof of vaccination to the Arrivecan app.
Ottawa plans to allow fully vaccinated travellers from other countries to enter beginning Sept. 7.
There is no similar plan at the moment in the United States to allow fully vaccinated Canadians to cross the land border for non-essential travel, although individuals in both countries have always been able to arrive by air.
A White House spokesperson said the U.S. government is remaining vigilant to COVID-19 variants, “and we’ll reopen when the health and medical experts believe it’s safe to sustainably do so.”
Also, as of Aug. 9, the Canadian government will no longer impose a 14-day quarantine period on unvaccinated children under the age of 12, who must still be tested and avoid congregate settings such as daycares for 14 days.
“We do see international evidence that the pandemic is not over,” Health Minister Patty Hajdu told a news conference Monday. “Thanks to the hard work of Canadians, things are much better here in Canada and our progress has been hard won.”
Canada will still require fully vaccinated travellers to have a negative COVID-19 test result within 72 hours prior to their arrival.
However, fully vaccinated travellers will no longer be tested upon arrival as of Aug. 9, although some will be randomly tested at airports and border crossings.
A government official speaking on background said fully vaccinated travellers present “a much lower risk,” and the “testing regime will not be able to accommodate very high volumes of individuals.”
The new testing protocol is a mistake, according to experts who recently urged the government to increase testing for fully vaccinated travellers to two times in the 14 days following their arrival.
“It’s not at all clear that they’ve modelled how they’re going to respond to an almost inevitable dangerous new variant in the fall getting in through this filter,” said Robert Greenhill, a former federal deputy minister and co-founder of COVID Strategic Choices, a group of experts that studies the optimal strategy to manage the virus in Canada.
“It’s one of those things where I hope that there will not be a new variant, but I fear there will be, and I’m quite concerned that the measures announced today will be incapable of stopping any dangerous new variants this fall.”
Full vaccination is highly effective against hospitalization or death, but not 100 per cent effective against infection or transmission, especially when it comes to the Delta variant and likely future variants, noted a joint paper by COVID Strategic Choices and a group of international researchers called Pandemics & Borders.
The paper, which urged more testing of fully vaccinated travellers, was signed by a number of Canadian epidemiologists, infection diseases specialists and other public health experts.
The median incubation period for COVID-19 is about five days, and therefore not all cases would be caught using the test taken within 72 hours prior to arrival, said Julianne Piper, research fellow and project coordinator with Pandemics & Borders based in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University.
“You could potentially be exposed to the virus between taking that test and arriving at the border, and if you don’t end up in that random sampling (for testing on arrival), there is a chance you could import a case into Canada,” she said.