United Airlines said it will offer seasonal service this summer to Croatia, Greece and Iceland. These countries have said they will be open to vaccinated tourists by then.
In a separate article than the one I'm posting below, the airline said they have seen an increase of 61% of searches on their website for these destinations.
Addendum: American Airlines will start service to Greece in June and later in the year to Tel Aviv from NY and Miami.
Infection rates in Greece and Croatia continue to rise. Just because you can go somewhere doesn’t mean you should go there. Personally, I wouldn’t want to risk infecting any locals. I am due my second jab in a couple of weeks.
Iceland looks a better bet.
United's new seasonal flight to Athens is from Washington-Dulles (IAD).
The article says it will be daily, but I was just fiddling around on Google Flights, because a relative is considering a trip to Greece later this year, and it looks as if the flight may not be daily after all. The outbound non-stop option (I randomly chose a departure date of July 20) disappears as I change the return date to anything in the range of August 6 - 9. Very odd.
My Delta flights to Iceland are Cleveland to Boston to Keflavik. This route is listed daily.
I have been watching the seat maps and hoping that there will be enough passengers to make it a go. Most of the first class and comfort plus seats are full.
Infection rates in Greece and Croatia continue to rise. Just because
you can go somewhere doesn’t mean you should go there. Personally, I
wouldn’t want to risk infecting any locals. I am due my second jab in
a couple of weeks.Iceland looks a better bet.
If it is about not risking infecting locals, how us Iceland a better choice? After all, out Fauci says the only safe activity for a vaccinated person is to sit across the table from another vaccinated person. Even then he didn't seem enthusiastic about that idea. Best to stay home until COVID is eradicated 100%.
"Best to stay home until COVID is eradicated 100%."
Then you will be at home for the rest of your life.
My "safety" guideline for travel this summer is not a sarcastic "100% Eradicated", but a general look at hospital capacity, and how it's trending. I'm fully vaccinated, reducing much of my concern for infection, as well as much of my concern about being a spreader.
But if I break a leg or get otherwise seriously sick or injured, I'd rather not be in a city where COVID patients are dying in the hospitals' hallways for lack of capacity to house them or even care for them.
There was an article in today’s NYTimes entitled “Irrational COVID fears” (sorry it was emailed to me so no link). It pretty much says that even though people are vaccinated and the chances of getting COVID are around 1 in 11,000, there is still a fear to go out. COVID will not be zero in the foreseeable future so we have to learn to live with it, just like the flu. We just returned from Texas after attending a wedding with over 120 people. While at the event, COVID was a faint memory, even just for those few hours, it was a great evening.
Barbara, are you going to do a trip report? Did you make it to Waco?
It’s not just a risk to locals. I don’t want Covid and nor do I want to have to resort to using hospital or medical facilities in countries whose health services have been stretched to breaking point. The U.K.’s National Health service has been overrun for the past year and is at point of collapse. Personally, I don’t want to see this made worse by foreign tourists bringing something in with them. Testing isn’t 100% conclusive, as some of my friends have experienced.
You must have different advice and research in the USA from Europe with regards to how much protection the vaccinations give.
You must have different advice and research in the USA from Europe
with regards to how much protection the vaccinations give.
Our official Federal Government advise is to stay home, distance, mask; vaccinated or not.
Vaccine effectiveness is 95% meaning 5 in a 1000 could contract the virus if put in a situation of exposure. But symptoms will be less severe. Many think fully 1/3 of all Americans have been infected over the last 12 months, most without symptoms.
So the question would be, if you are in the 5 in a thousand group, what are the odds of you being exposed on a two week trip? And if you are exposed, what are the odds of you displaying any symptoms? Or needing hospitalization? I think I heard that one vaccinated person actually died of COVID, so that's one in 30 million so far? I don't have the answers. But at what point do you get on with life? I don't have a universal answer for that either. What i see as infinitesimal, you might see otherwise. If you feel a need to stay locked down, no one has the right to question that.
Vaccine effectiveness is 95% meaning 5 in a 1000...
I've never heard percents expressed in thousands before...new math? "Per cent" means one in a hundred, so it would be 50 in a 1,000 using your example.
A 95% efficacy rate means that if you turned the same (large) number of vaccinated people and unvaccinated people loose in the same area(s) and 100 unvaccinated people caught COVID-19, you'd expect 5 of the vaccinated people to catch it. That tells us nothing about how many people per hundred (or thousand or million) will actually get the virus, vaccinated or not. That would depend to a significant degree on how many people in the environment are currently infected and how contagious the circulating variants are, as well as (obviously) how long the data-collection period runs.
My concern with traveling to places still suffering from significant outbreaks is not really that I might catch COVID-19 and become sick enough to need medical treatment or hospitalization; that's theoretically possible but quite unlikely. It's that I might have some other medical issue requiring a doctor's intervention at a time when I'd be a burden on the local infrastructure. Surely that's not a hard concept to grasp? It's not a theoretical concern. I've twice needed medical treatment in Europe. A third time I though I did, but it was a false alarm. In addition, I'm accident-prone and am always just one stumble away from a bad ankle injury. And my late mother was hospitalized in Greece for about 2 weeks.
acraven is correct (with some minor wording caveats)
More reading here for whoever is interested:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/health/covid-vaccine-95-effective.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/learning/what-does-95-effective-mean-teaching-the-math-of-vaccine-efficacy.html
The CDC says that fully vaccinated people can travel domestically without quarantine or testing. And that's what I'm going to do starting the first of May. I am going to travel around the U.S. I will still wear a mask, social distance as best as I can, stay away from large gatherings, and wash my hands or use hand sanitizer often.
By the time I check out, I will have been in my hotel room for 472 nights. I NEED to get away. In the last month, I took three short trips, two of which were for the vaccine. During those trips I was so much happier.
The CDC says that fully vaccinated people can travel domestically
without quarantine or testing. And that's what I'm going to do
starting the first of May. I am going to travel around the U.S. I will
still wear a mask, social distance as best as I can, stay away from
large gatherings, and wash my hands or use hand sanitizer often.
Sounds like fun.
