Pandemic travel regulations are frustrating parents whose children are visiting family in other countries and those who can't afford the cost of a ticket and a two-week hotel quarantine upon return.
Media reports suggest the White House is considering domestic travel restrictions to control spread of a new COVID-19 variant. Gov. Ron DeSantis say this would be unconstitutional.
Even as the European Union began vaccine rollouts on Sunday, nations around the globe are instituting severe lockdowns and travel restrictions. Fear of the U.K. variant is a key reason.
The coronavirus variant is sweeping through the United Kingdom and prompting travel restrictions in other countries. France's first confirmed case is in a citizen who recently returned from London.
Several European nations, including Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany and Italy, announced travel restrictions from the U.K. where officials say a new variant of the coronavirus is rapidly spreading.
Couples discuss how travel restrictions have kept them oceans apart for months. While they lobby governments to allow them to see each other, some have had to delay weddings or even miss a childbirth.
Travelers were stuck without a way to get back to their pets amid coronavirus travel restrictions. Now expats in China are chartering a flight to bring dogs and cats over to their owners.
Chief among the criteria for easing restrictions on foreign travelers: The epidemiological situation in their home countries "should be as good as or better than in the EU," a spokesperson tells NPR.
"The U.S. domestic market is so large that even a substantial decrease leaves a lot of traffic in the sky," says Ian Petchenik, of the aviation tracking site Flightradar24.com.
President Trump's decision to bar visitors from Europe has been followed by new restrictions in other nations. Here's a survey of which doors are being closed to travelers and where.
![Poornima Peri, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her two sons. Aarit (left), now age 4, is India staying with his grandmother. His mother had planned to pick him up but "from March [2020] onward it was total lockdown," she says. Because of continui](https://knpr.org/sites/default/files/public/styles/thumbnail/public/images/npr-story/1010894589_1638921604.jpg?itok=9l5EVDqI "Poornima Peri")
