Brent Pin­heiro 

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt 

The Unit­ed States will now re­quire all in­bound trav­ellers, re­gard­less of na­tion­al­i­ty or vac­ci­na­tion sta­tus, to pro­vide a neg­a­tive COVID-19 test re­sult tak­en one day pri­or to trav­el. Ac­cord­ing to the CDC, the one-day pe­ri­od is one day be­fore the flight’s de­par­ture and not 24 hours be­fore. For ex­am­ple, if your flight is at 3 pm on a Sat­ur­day, you could board with a neg­a­tive test tak­en any time the Fri­day be­fore. The pol­i­cy comes in­to ef­fect on De­cem­ber 6th at 12:01 am EST.   

Orig­i­nal­ly, the US re­quired tests to be tak­en three days in ad­vance, but the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion says the tighter test­ing time­line will add a ‘de­gree of pub­lic pro­tec­tion.’ The move comes as the US at­tempts to slow the spread of the Omi­cron vari­ant.   

At this time, all air pas­sen­gers 2 years and old­er must present a neg­a­tive re­sult or doc­u­men­ta­tion of re­cov­ery from COVID-19 when check­ing in for a US-bound flight. If you re­cent­ly re­cov­ered from COVID-19 in the 90 days be­fore your flight’s de­par­ture, you will be re­quired to show doc­u­men­ta­tion of re­cov­ery from COVID-19. Doc­u­men­ta­tion in­cludes proof of a pos­i­tive COVID-19 vi­ral test re­sult on a sam­ple and a let­ter from a li­censed health­care provider or a pub­lic health of­fi­cial stat­ing that you have been cleared to trav­el. All non-US trav­ellers are re­quired to be ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed to en­ter the Unit­ed States un­less ex­empt. There is cur­rent­ly no re­quire­ment for ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple to quar­an­tine up­on ar­rival in the Unit­ed States.  

Rapid anti­gen and PCR test re­sults are ac­cept­ed for trav­el. Anti­gen tests start at $300TT with re­sults usu­al­ly avail­able in 20-30 mins. PCR tests start at $900TT, it usu­al­ly takes 24-48 hours to get back re­sults though they can come in soon­er.