President Donald Trump’s administration plans to end coronavirus health screenings for passengers entering the United States from foreign countries, according to Yahoo News.
What’s going on:
Since the pandemic began, the U.S. began hosting enhanced health screenings for passengers entering the country from Wuhan, China, where the virus is believed to have had its first outbreak.
Several airports added these screenings to test travelers from high-risk countries.
A Transportation Security Administration official told CNN that a draft of a memo that lays out the cancellation began circulating.
- The memo says 15 out of 675,000 people screened tested positive for COVID-19.
American Airlines agreed with the cancellation in a statement to CNN:
We continue to support spending scarce screening resources where they can best be utilized and no longer believe that it makes sense to continue screening at these 15 airports given the extremely low number of passengers identified by the (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) as potentially having a health issue.
The screenings began in January:
In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent 100 staff members to three different airports to screen passengers arriving from China. Health officials worried at the time that travelers may have contracted the coronavirus, which, at the time, had been a mysterious new virus.