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The European Union on Friday recommended its member states lift a ban on non-essential travel for visitors from the United States, a move that is sure to be welcomed by Americans eager to travel to the continent after more than a year of tight restrictions.
The recommendation is non-binding, and each member state can decide on regulations, including quarantine, to impose on visitors. Americans were essentially banned from entering Europe as the United States grappled with one of the highest number of issues in the world.
The opening is also expected to provide relief to southern European countries that rely heavily on tourism, including Italy and Portugal. Those countries have pressured the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, to act so that the entire summer tourist season is not affected by the absence of Americans, who are considered relatively big spenders.
The decision comes just days after President Biden visited Brussels, where he met with top EU officials.
But despite mutual pledges of affection between Biden and officials, travel remains one-sided. Europeans are still barred from entering the United States for non-essential travel even if they are fully vaccinated, after the blanket travel ban announced by President Donald J. Trump in March 2020 and extended by Biden in January.
The official decision was made on Friday by European economic ministers, who agreed to add the United States to the list of countries considered safe from an epidemic point of view. This means that travelers from those countries should be free to enter the block, even if they are not fully vaccinated, on the basis of a negative PCR test for active coronavirus infection.
But the EU cannot force member states to open up to American visitors. Each country is free to maintain or impose stricter restrictions, such as committing to quarantine on arrival or undergoing a series of additional tests.
Countries like Greece and Spain, which rely heavily on tourism, have already moved in recent weeks to reopen their doors to tourists from outside the European Union, including from the United States. The European Commission criticized those early moves.
Greece scrapped the quarantine requirement for all residents of the European Union, as well as travelers from several third countries, including the United States and Britain, in April, provided they had evidence of Covid-19 vaccination, recovery from illness or a negative Covid test.
Following Friday’s recommendation, Germany announced that it will allow entry to all Americans from June 20, regardless of their vaccination status. The German government added that it will open borders to all non-EU citizens who have been vaccinated with shots approved by Europe’s Medicines Regulatory Authority, and where the worrisome variables are not prevalent. This does not include Britain.
More open travel last summer between European countries was blamed for the increased number of fatal cases.
But more than half of the EU population has now received at least one vaccine injection, creating better conditions for opening economies and restoring freedom of travel. However, concerns remain about openness as new highly contagious variants, such as those known as delta, spread.
“Re-traveling between continents is good, but it is not without risk,” said Marc van Ranst, a leading virologist in Belgium and government adviser. “Lossing travel restrictions during the summer period will inevitably lead to the spread of the delta variant, also in countries where it has not yet been established.”
However, Dr. Van Ranst said he did not expect a spike in Covid-19 cases like that last fall, but insisted the importance of a second dose of the vaccine to provide adequate protection.
Jean-Michel Dony, a professor at Namur University in Belgium and an advisor to the European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization, praised the decision to open up to travelers from the US because America “feeds a lot, and with effective vaccines against the delta variant”.
But he also cautioned against opening up too much and too quickly. “We are in an intermediate position,” he said. “The vaccination campaign is progressing, but we need to follow the situation closely and be prepared to reimpose restrictions.”
To do this, the block has maintained the so-called emergency brake, a legal tool that allows it to quickly impose more restrictive measures.
In the spring of 2020, in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the European Union largely banned the arrival of foreign travelers. There were a few exceptions for countries that met specific criteria, including low infection rates, as well as general conditions, such as a comprehensive response to Covid-19 and reciprocity for outside countries in welcoming European visitors.
By introducing these less granular requirements, the bloc gained more discretion in choosing which countries to include in the list. China meets quantitative criteria, but entry for Chinese travelers is conditional on reciprocity, although EU economic ministers agreed on Friday to scrap the reciprocity requirement for Hong Kong and Macau. The reciprocity clause appears to have been dropped in the case of the United States.
The European Commission said on Friday it “hopes” that the United States will soon ease the travel ban.
“We have received assurances that this is a matter of the highest priority for the US administration,” said Adalbert Ganz, the commission’s spokesperson for home affairs, adding that a group of experts was meeting on Friday with the aim of “re-starting safe and sustainable travel between the EU and the US.”
Restrictive policies on both sides of the Atlantic have separated families and communities from billions of dollars in losses to the tourism and aviation industries and mostly halted transatlantic commercial travel. Celia Beilin, visiting fellow in foreign policy at the US Center, said many Europeans living and working in the United States have not traveled to Europe because once the US embargo is in place, they can be prevented from returning to America. Europe at the Brookings Institution.
Ms. Bellin, a French national living in Washington, DC, said, “My whole family is in France or Belgium. We are completely isolated here. It has been heartbreaking.”
With Europe’s vaccination drive gaining momentum after an initial slump, the European Commission last month recommended unrestricted entry to anyone outside the bloc who was not an EU citizen and was fully vaccinated with vaccines approved by the EU’s drug regulator or by the EU. World Health Organization.
Friday’s decision extends that recommendation to everyone from the United States, whether or not they have been vaccinated.
Experts say the lifting of travel restrictions among the world’s richest countries with high vaccination rates highlights stark global disparities when it comes to getting vaccines for Covid-19.
said Dr. Thomas Kenyon, chief health officer for Project HOPE, a global health and relief organization, and a former director of global health at the Centers for Disease Control. “This is due in large part to the insufficient global vaccine supply to meet current demand and the inability of low-income countries to compete in the market against wealthier nations.”
The further opening of the European Union comes as it works towards the July 1 target for broad application of the Covid certification system. Sixteen member states began issuing and accepting the certificate at the beginning of June, ahead of schedule.
The certificate records whether people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, recovered from Covid-19 or tested negative in the past 72 hours, and allows people who meet one of the three criteria to move freely across the 27 member states. The bloc’s long-term goal is for its certifications to align with those issued by national authorities in partner countries such as the United States, but that goal may be out of reach.
Contributed by Christopher F. Schweitz reporting from Berlin and Nikki Kitsantonis from Athens.
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