NEW YORK, Mar 28 (APP):An American journalist returning from a private trip to Pakistan has praised the precautionary measures put in place at the Islamabad international airport to stop the spread of coronavirus, which has infected and killed thousands of people around the world.
At the same time, Vanessa Larson, a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post, expressed her shock in an article published in her newspaper that there were no covid-19 screening measures or advisories about quarantining when she and her husband flew back to New York’s John F. Kennedy international airport last week, despite America’s largest city being the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.
“In fact, while we’ve decided to self-quarantine for two weeks out of concern about the covid-19 pandemic, no (US) government official ever told us to do so — it just seemed like the right thing to do,” Ms. Larson said in her piece, headlined: ‘Pakistan screened us for coronavirus. Nobody checked us when we got back to JFK.’
“The disconnect between the illness’s mounting human toll and this seemingly lax approach to incoming international air passengers has opened our eyes to the federal government’s insufficient response to the coronavirus and caused us to ask why our country, with its vast resources, seemingly can’t or won’t take the coronavirus as seriously as it should,” she wrote.
“When we arrived in Pakistan on March 13, we each underwent a temperature scan at the Islamabad airport. We also had to fill out a form asking if we’d been in China or Iran, two countries hit hard by covid-19, during the previous 14 days. We were asked to check boxes indicating if we had a fever, cough or shortness of breath. Though 2 a.m. was probably a low-traffic arrival time, it was a painless, organized process, not a major inconvenience.”
Ms. Larson and her husband, who had gone to Pakistan to attend a friend’s wedding, spent 8 days in the country.
On their return to New York, she wrote, “We simply got off the plane and proceeded to the U.S. citizens’ line, as if returning from any normal overseas trip. We did our customs declaration (Are you bringing in any food?) at an electronic kiosk. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer who scanned our passports (and who was wearing gloves) asked us a couple of questions about where we’d been and what we’d done in Pakistan. My husband was kept back for a few minutes of additional questioning, which appeared to be motivated more by security concerns than health. No one said a word about quarantines.
“After that, we breezily made our way through baggage claim and customs. As we went through security in the nearly empty airport before our connecting flight to Washington, we noticed fraying posters warning travelers about the transmission of measles an almost comical indication of the outdatedness of the public health messaging….
“If a country with fewer resources, such as Pakistan, can implement temperature checks for incoming travelers, why can’t the U.S.?,” Ms. Larson asked.
