Which States Have Coronavirus Travel Restrictions? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Hawaii has one of the strictest quarantine laws in the country.
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The state’s geographic isolation has helped and hurt its efforts to control the virus. On one hand, the state would be completely unequipped to deal with a coronavirus surge. There are no states nearby from which to borrow doctors or ICU capacity. The island of Kauai has just 15 ventilators. On the other hand, everyone enters Hawaii through its airports, which makes enforcing a quarantine easier there than in almost every other state.
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There’s no national database of quarantine noncompliance, but in U.S. states other than Hawaii, quarantine violations rarely result in fines or jail time—or, really, any consequences at all,
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Yet quarantine compliance is essential for the combination of testing, contact tracing, and isolation of sick people to work. Simply telling people they’ve been exposed and letting them loose on the nation’s Outback Steakhouses is not sufficient
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Hawaii created its quarantine law as a travel quarantine, stopping everyone at the airport. These types of quarantines are logistically easier to implement—they don’t require contact tracers—than medical quarantines, in which the state orders a certain individual to stay in isolation
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Some other countries have imposed much tougher travel restrictions and quarantine policies. At one point, Greeks were required to text authorities to explain why they needed to go out. Norway quarantined its own citizens under threat of a fine or imprisonment. Most foreigners still can’t fly to Vietnam.
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Keen believes that Hawaii residents are on such high alert because of long-ago pandemics that came to the islands and killed large percentages of the population
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“Generations of stories you hear, from great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, that the pandemics nearly killed off Native Hawaiians,” she told me. “So there is a great fear here of outsiders coming in and bringing it with them.”
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On the mainland, states cite a combination of COVID-19 denial, logistical hurdles, and funding and personnel shortages to explain why they haven’t been willing or able to enforce quarantines.
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scofflaws: Some people stay inside for three or four days, then decide, “I’m bored with staying home,”
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Even if a North Dakotan wants to do the right thing, she might not be able to without going hungry or losing her job. Grocery delivery isn’t available in parts of the large and rural state
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In fact, many COVID-exposed Americans who want to stay home and quarantine have an intractable problem: Their bosses won’t let them
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The Families First Coronavirus Response Act granted paid leave to recover from COVID-19 to many Americans. But the law doesn’t cover everyone: Large companies aren’t included, and small companies can claim an exemption. Because of these exemptions, only 47 percent of private-sector workers have guaranteed access to coronavirus-related sick leave,
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The U.S. is the only country out of 193 nations to exclude workers from sick-leave benefits based on the size of the company they work for, according to a recent UCLA study.
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“We don’t really pay people to stay at home to quarantine,” Polly Price, a global-health professor at Emory University, says. But that’s exactly the problem: In a study in Israel, people were more likely to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19 if they were paid during their isolation.
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Months into the pandemic, half of Americans didn’t know they might have the right to stay home with pay if they contracted the coronavirus.
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even if they did, employers might have pressured them to come to work if they were no longer showing symptoms,
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“After testing positive, employees are being scheduled and expected to work as long as they don’t show symptoms and [are] not placed in quarantine,” a worker at a Georgia taco restaurant complained in July. OSHA has formally inspected just 11 of the employers in these incidents. “Under the Trump administration, OSHA decided to do almost no enforcement,”
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America’s laissez-faire federal pandemic response has, in effect, treated each state like its own country
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When it comes time to isolate sick people, though, it becomes painfully clear that states aren’t countries. Wisconsin can’t stop Iowans from driving into it. North Dakota doesn’t have enough health workers to trace all of its infected citizens. The governor can’t help you when your employer is—legally—dragging you back into the office.
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the reason Hawaii has been so ruthlessly effective at quarantine is that it in some ways still acts as its own country with its own border controls.
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The state consistently has some of the lowest case numbers in the nation. As with so many other pandemic rules, Americans might not like quarantine, but it works.