The CDC has screwed up again! What a surprise.

The Atlanta, Georgia based CDC has done it again.

I wrote before about the agency’s bad (what passes for) decisions in their effort to do what their name implies – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sadly, they are making a half-hearted, band-aid rule that doesn’t do much good, but actually does a lot of harm.

Do they care, as long as they keep their jobs and make lots of money? I don’t think so, as it’s the optics that are important in government, not results. Something similar to our border wall, that is porous, by design.

This time around, if travelers are outside of the United States, they are forcing airlines to check for a recent (3 day) negative Covid-19 test result.

If you are travelling to the US by airplane you may have a significant problem as you must test negative, so you will be allowed to board the airplane. Or at least have a piece of paper saying that you are. They aren’t stopping people entering on foot or vehicles, just airplanes. Why?

It’s called “Sell the Sizzle, not the Steak.” It’s in the name… Control and Prevention. “Let’s show how we are preventing Covid-19 by asking for a Covid negative test document.”

I’m confident that this will change to a waiver if you’ve been vaccinated.

The waiver is the plan, although vaccination doesn’t mean you won’t get corona virus, just less likely to. Read about the New York congressman who received both vaccinations and still caught Covid-19. So much for vaccines.

So let’s look at the mechanics of how the airline rule as it is supposed to work, and how it will be gamed. I’ll use your family visiting Mexico on vacation as an example. If you travel to a country without a land border with the United States it can get far more complicated and expensive.

Let’s say that you decide to go on a family vacation at a resort near Cancun, Mexico and book four airline round trips for you, your spouse and two children.

After a wonderful visit, each person takes an unreliable antigen corona virus test (another $150-$500 expense) or tests to determine if the airline will allow your family to board the airplane for the return flight home. In this example, three members of your family test negative and you fail, testing positive! Or the airline doesn’t like the test.

So what do you do? Obviously you take another test as they aren’t reliable. And if you fail them, you worry and wish you had bought medical insurance before the vacation.

In this nightmare vacation you are in an awkward position for a number of reasons, not counting that you’ve forfeited your expensive airline ticket home –

1 The test may be inaccurate, so you’ll have the option to keep taking it, within the 72 hour regulation window, until you get a negative result. You’ll show that piece of paper at the check-in counter. That will work, although expensive. It’s like Covid roulette. Eventually, your number will win… you hope.

2 Of course, once you’ve taken the test with a bad result, the hotel won’t let you back in if you tell them and the airline won’t let you on the airplane, so you may be forced to buy a fake test result and use that.

I don’t think that the airline has to prove, electronically, that the paper test result is real and I suspect they won’t ask too many questions.

3 So your family flies home to avoid four forfeited, expensive tickets, and you’ll have to take a bus to the border… but the bus company will  take your temperature which may be a problem.

Or you can rent a car and drive (daytime only, as the northern Mexican states are dangerous at night) to the United States, drop the car off (if you can get a one-way rental), walk across the border and take an airplane home.

Or you may be able to fly within Mexico to a border city and cross into the US on foot so you can get back into the USA. That’s if the Mexican airline let’s you fly. More temperature checks and declarations.

Our government cannot stop a citizen from entering the United States at the border, but they can make it difficult and expensive to stop you before you get there. That’s what this airline rule is all about.

For example, if you are in Mexico City you can fly to Juarez for about $40, take a $2 Uber to the border and walk across. Catch another Uber to the El Paso, Texas airport and fly home. It’s workable, but a nightmare trip.

If you happen to live in a border city, such as San Diego you may not want to fly to Cancun from San Diego; instead crossing the border on foot and flying from the Tijuana airport. You can reverse the process and not have any problems reentering the United States on foot.

Of course, it’s a lot more difficult, time consuming and possibly expensive (although internal Mexico flights are cheap) but where there is a problem, there is a solution.

I think that the CDC’s action is the first step towards a national ID card where that test and huge amounts of other information will be recorded in US government databases (“for your protection”), so there will be no escape from being tracked.

Of course, this rule will stop a lot of people flying anywhere overseas, especially islands, and will help trash many countries economies that depend on US visitors without doing much, if anything, to stop the spread.

It’s optics.

If the (what passes for) decision makers at the CDC really wanted to do their jobs and slow down transmission from people entering the United States, they would just close the borders. Period.

They would tell US nationals who are overseas to return quickly or be forced to make a land entry. The CDC will not… they are afraid, very afraid of a negative public reaction.

And for your information, these countries currently block access.

Good optics. That’s all this is about.

January 25 addendum

So if you want to visit Mexico, for example, it will be a lot more complicated now! The US government will soon force a two week quarantine when flying back from Mexico, (or anywhere from a foreign destination) plus the Covid test. That means, you’ll have to return, for example, via Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, take Uber to the border with El Paso, take Uber to the El Paso airport and then fly back to your hometown. In other words, complicated but avoids the tests and, I think, the quarantine!

It’s a lot more complicated and will stop most travelers from even travelling overseas, so the US government will achieve its goal… whatever that is, aside from  optics.