What Does Isolation Mean in California for Vacation Travel
If your vacation plans were about to take you to the most populous state in our country, it’s time to cancel. Roughly the entire southern half of California is under the nonessential travel ban, and will likely remain in effect until the end of the year.
Why does California ban nonessential travel?
Ordering is based on ICU hospital capacity. As soon as it drops below 15%, the region will go into blocking mode and blocking will last until the capacity starts to increase again. Coronavirus patients take time to get sick and often spend weeks in the intensive care unit before freeing their beds, recovering or dying. The state acknowledged that current numbers mean things will only get worse in the coming weeks.
During normal years, a hospital with an overcrowded intensive care unit may send patients to other hospitals or hire traveling nurses as temporary workers. But right now, COVID cases are so high across the country that there is no shortage of systems. And even where there are beds, the rise in COVID cases means more and more hospital staff will call patients or need to be quarantined.
Your hotel might reject you
In gated areas, campgrounds are closed and hotels are not allowed to “accept or comply with state reservations for non-essential travel” unless you plan to quarantine them for 14 days. The insignificant ones are tourism and recreation.
State travel guidelines also discourage traveling between different parts of California.
You may not be able to get the test if you have no symptoms.
If you must travel, the CDC recommends getting a virus test one to three days before and three to five days after travel. (They don’t indicate what counts as “after,” but if you’re quarantining in California as needed, it makes sense to have the test done upon arrival.)
A California epidemiologist told the Washington Post that tests for COVID are so few that it will be impossible to get them if you are asymptomatic because the state is trying to keep those testing opportunities for symptomatic patients.
The same dilemma can arise in the country from which you are traveling. The pre-travel test is likely to be difficult if you are in an area with a lot of COVID cases, which is pretty much all over the place now.
Indeed, undo if you can
Remember how Thanksgiving was a terrible time to travel or even have lunch with people outside your home ? This advice is still valid. Your chances of becoming a carrier of COVID increase as the number of cases in your area rises. You can catch the coronavirus, and even if you don’t care about the consequences for yourself, you can pass it on to others: your family, your seatmates on the plane, the people you meet at highway rest stops, and more.