In an effort to reinstate COVID-19 travel restrictions, the European Union is set to remove the United States from its safe travel list.
According to the New York Times, the E.U. Council will on Monday announce its decision to take six countries off its non-binding list: the U.S., Kosovo, Israel, Montenegro, Lebanon and North Macedonia. As a result, citizens of the aforementioned countries traveling into the E.U. will be “barred from visiting for nonessential reasons and can be subject to further testing and quarantine requirements.”
In order to stay on the safe travel list, which allows travelers to enter the 27-nation bloc without additional COVID restrictions, countries must have no more than 75 new COVID-19 cases daily per 100,000 inhabitants over the previous 14 days. The U.S. is well above that threshold, having generated 91,648 new infection cases in just the past 24 hours, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The move comes just over two months after the U.S. was added to the safe travel list for the first time on June 18, at a time when the country was registering a decreasing trend of new coronavirus cases.
The E.U. safe list currently includes Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Montenegro, New Zealand, Qatar, Republic of Moldova, Republic of North Macedonia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Ukraine and the U.S.
