Travelers to US count the hours: Can they get their tests back in time?

Private dramas are playing out all over the world, as thousands of people — Americans living abroad and foreigners hoping to visit the United States — grapple with the new complexities of holiday travel in the age of Covid. The spread of the Omicron variant in the last week has injected even more uncertainty into an already fraught exercise. On Thursday the Biden administration shortened the time frame for international travelers to the United States to take a Covid test within a day before departure, regardless of vaccination status. That has left would-be travelers nervously calculating whether they will get test results back in time to make their flights or worrying that their home countries could impose more stringent travel bans while they are away. The United States stopped short of imposing a mandatory seven-day quarantine on arrivals, which many travelers said would have torpedoed their plans. Nor did it upgrade its standard for an acceptable Covid screen from an antigen to a PCR test, which can take significantly longer to produce results. But the new one-day window for getting tested announced by the CDC has nevertheless added an extra layer of preflight stress.Public-health experts said there was a sound reason to shorten the time frame for test results: it would detect more infections in travelers. And since the results for antigen tests are normally available within a few hours, it should be possible to take a test and get the results within the prescribed period. “A negative test is a good idea, especially since fully vaccinated people can transmit the virus,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh. But she acknowledged that the patchwork of travel restrictions and the shifting nature of the rules were exacting a toll on people.<br/>