The new rules would require every traveler flying into the United States from another country to test negative one day before their departure, changing rules that already allow domestic travelers to test up to maximum three days before entry. The new rule from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will go into effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on Monday.
“Experts say Covid-19 cases will continue to increase in the coming weeks and winter this year,” the president said. “So we need to be ready.”
Any foreign nationals arriving in the US must be fully immunized, although there is still no vaccination requirement for US citizens traveling by air, globally or domestically. Earlier, the White House said a day earlier that the vaccine requirement for domestic travel remained on the table as an option for the future.
“This happens every week to determine what we need and what the status of the job is. We’ll learn a lot more over the next few weeks about the lethality of this virus, about how contagious it is, about whether or not we can control it, etc,” he continued.
The Delta variant of the coronavirus remains the dominant variant globally and in the United States.
This story was updated with additional information on Thursday.
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