The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed its country-by-country list of COVID-19 travel advisories on Monday.
The CDC said in a statement to The Hill that its ability to accurately assess the risk for most places that Americans visit has become limited as fewer countries are testing and reporting COVID-19 cases.
The agency will only post a travel health notice for a country if a situation like a “concerning” COVID-19 variant occurs.
“Regardless of their travel destination, all international travelers should stay up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines and follow recommendations found on CDC’s COVID-19 International Travel webpage,” the statement reads.
The announcement comes as a new round of booster shots have become available in the United States to protect people from the omicron variant and subvariants of the coronavirus.
Much of the country and the world has fully returned to normal activities in recent months, as COVID-19 cases are causing fewer hospitalizations and deaths than during earlier in the pandemic.
The seven-day rolling average of cases in the U.S. is still above 40,000 in the past week, and the average number of deaths is above 300, but both numbers have been gradually dropping recently.
President Biden made headlines last month when he said during an interview on “60 Minutes” that the pandemic is over, but acknowledging that a lingering problem remains with the virus.
Responding to those remarks, the White House’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci said the pandemic is “heading in the right direction,” but that the intensity of outbreaks remains “unacceptably high.”
“We still must be aware of how unusual this virus is and continues to be in its ability to evolve into new variants which defy the standard public health mechanisms of addressing an outbreak,” he said, warning that a new variant would likely emerge heading into winter.
