The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped all nations from its highest COVID-19 Level 4 “do not travel” designation Monday after announcing a coming update to its travel health notice system last week.
Roughly 90 countries were stricken from the list and bumped down to the lower Level 3 designation, which advises citizens that COVID-19 risk in a given country remains high but travel is OK for vaccinated voyagers.
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“To help the public understand when the highest level of concern is most urgent, this new system will reserve Level 4 travel health notices for special circumstances, such as rapidly escalating case trajectory or extremely high case counts, emergence of a new variant of concern, or healthcare infrastructure collapse,” the agency said last week.
The CDC’s travel recommendations rank countries Level 1–4 on the COVID-19 safety for travelers. The agency also ranks some countries as Level Unknown if it is unsure about the state of the pandemic there. Currently, there are 122 countries at the Level 3 designation, 12 countries at Level 2, 55 at Level 1, and 49 at unknown.
Some of the countries bumped down from Level 4 include France, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Switzerland, which are among the top 10 international travel destinations for Americans, according to Forbes. Travel between the United States and many of those countries remained ongoing despite the CDC’s advisory.
Other countries that were at the CDC’s Level 4 designation last week included Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Israel, and New Zealand, which implemented aggressive measures to curb the viral spread during the pandemic.
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The changes Monday come on the heels of a letter by White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha calling for an end to “avoid travel” COVID-19 advisories.
