Plan a Low Risk Vacation With a CDC Travel Card
If you are planning to travel internationally soon, your first stop should be the CDC Travel Guidelines for a Destination Map. Here you can see how your destination country ranks in terms of COVID cases.
At the time of this writing, things are generally not doing well. There are four categories: low, medium, high, and very high risk. The very high list is the longest, with about 75 countries including the United States. The next largest list is “high”.
Who is Low Risk? At the moment, this list includes China, Australia, several countries of Eastern Europe (including Poland and Romania), as well as a number of African countries from Mali to Sudan.
The card provides an indication of current conditions, so it does not guarantee that the risk to the country will still be low by the time of your planned vacation. But it can give you an idea, and you can keep checking it out as your date gets closer. CDC recommends the following precautions for different levels of risk:
- Very High Risk: “Avoid traveling to these destinations. If you need to travel to these places, make sure you are fully vaccinated before traveling. “
- High Risk: “Make sure you are fully vaccinated before traveling to these locations. Unvaccinated travelers should avoid non-essential travel to these locations. ”
- Moderate risk: “Make sure you are fully vaccinated before traveling to these locations. Unvaccinated travelers who are at increased risk of serious illness from COVID-19 should avoid non-essential travel to these locations. ”
- Low risk: “Make sure you are fully vaccinated before traveling to these locations.”
Countries for which no data are available are considered very high risk, with a “avoid travel” warning. And yes, the CDC recommends getting vaccinated before travel anywhere. Find out more on their international travel page .
If you are traveling domestically, by the way, there is a map of the US counties showing the current COVID status, as well as guidelines for domestic travelers .