Vaccinated vacations, dequarantainized vacations?

While vaccination campaigns against COVID-19 are progressing at different rates in different countries, we can’t expect to see their impact before summer, or even worse, autumn.

However, it should not be forgotten thatvaccination is currently the only thing that will allow us to return to a semblance of normality. provided we don’t forget at the end of the story to reclaim all the freedoms we gave up along the way, and that the preventive measures that made sense in the absence of a vaccine disappear once it becomes widespread.

Is vaccination a de facto standard in the airline industry?

Many people are wondering whether vaccinations will be compulsory for travel in the future, something which is not generally viewed favorably.

It’s a point that can be debated for hours from the point of view of individual freedoms, philosophy, medicine, ethics and economics, without ever coming to an agreement. We can agree, however, that such a measure logically belongs more to governments than to private businesses, and that it will be anything but obvious to generalize insofar as none of them seems to be moving towards compulsory vaccination of its population. As a result, it will be very difficult to require foreigners to be vaccinated before entering a country when its own nationals are not subject to the same constraint.

If it’s not impossible for vaccination to become a de jure standard, it may well become a de facto standard. While limiting travel from one country to another to being vaccinated raises a number of questions, restricting certain activities in a given territory to those who have been vaccinated seems much simpler to implement. So even if vaccination isn’t compulsory for travel, it’s in your best interest to be vaccinated, to get the most out of your destination, and even to avoid certain restrictions.

Elimination of quarantines for vaccinated people?

Once a person has been vaccinated, and we’re betting on the vaccine’s efficacy (which would be the least we could do), we can say that certain restrictions should logically no longer apply to those who have been vaccinated.

Among them, the quarantine. And yet today we see very few signs that things will be different for vaccinated people tomorrow. Let’s hope it’s because we’re in the early weeks of the vaccination process, and that things will gradually fall into place as more and more people become concerned. It’s also fair to say that, given the priority populations for vaccination, we’re far from the travel industry’s core target.

Nevertheless, some countries are beginning to unveil their plans, and we dare to believe that they foreshadow a fundamental trend and what will be tomorrow’s norm.

Seychelles and Thailand open their arms to the vaccinated

A few days ago, the Seychelles announced that vaccinated travellers would no longer be subject to quarantine on their territory. The same is true in Thailand, except that the measure is not expected to be introduced there before autumn.

It’s no surprise that countries are beginning to take a stand on this issue. In Thailand, tourism accounts for 22% of GDP, and 65% in the Seychelles!

It’s a safe bet that the countries most dependent on tourism and in need of foreign currency will be the first to take a stand on the subject, simply for reasons of economic survival.

But it’s hard to see how others couldn’t follow suit: it’s hard to see how a country could try to convince its own population to vaccinate and at the same time continue to treat the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated. which would mean it has doubts about the vaccine’s efficacy.

Iceland, Poland and Romania also announced that they were considering similar measures.

We’re betting on a snowball effect once a critical mass of people is involved, so… certainly not before the summer… at best. And we hope that the lesson of the cacophony of variable-geometry measures taken during the various waves of the virus to restrict access to certain countries (particularly in Europe) will have been learned, and that for once the States will have a concerted and synchronized policy in this area.

So yes, the vaccine is definitely the gateway to unrestricted travel. It remains to be seen when.

Image : covid vaccine and by Jc valenzuela via Shutterstock