The U.S. brought home 18,000 Americans. More than 30,000 are still stranded abroad.
And these are ones who want to get home, as coronavirus-related travel restrictions have left thousands of U.S. citizens in other countries.
Foreign governments have closed borders, shut down airports and banned social gatherings of any capacity in a drastic effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, leaving the State Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a flurry to bring many Americans home.
Both agencies have been operating repatriation flights overseas. The State Department announced it returned 18,406 U.S. citizens from more than 40 countries — mostly from Peru, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — who were stranded due to the pandemic as of March 28. Thousands came home on more than 178 flights since the start of the retrieval efforts; 60 additional flights are scheduled for the this week.
But as of March 28, State Department officials claimed 33,000 Americans were in possible need of the government’s assistance coming home.
Although estimates reached 50,000 just a week prior, the head of the State Department’s repatriation task, Ian Brownlee, said this was due partly to a calculation error and partly due to the fact that many travelers “have decided they’re just going to wait it out, wait out the curfew or wait out the quarantine where they are.”
Americans who went elsewhere prior to the Level 4 health advisory blanketing all international travel found themselves stuck in unprecedented situations, such as a group of 14 Americans quarantined in a hostel in Cusco, Peru: Multiple guests tested positive for COVID-19 and were given a notice to quarantine for at least one to three months.
The advisory is one of many measures the U.S. has passed in an effort to quell the novel coronavirus, which has penetrated 178 countries and regions; there are almost 790,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and close to 38,000 deaths worldwide as of March 31, according to Johns Hopkins’ Center for Systems Science and Engineering live tracker. In the U.S., there have been nearly 165,000 recognized cases — the most of any country in the world — across all states; the death toll approaches 3,200.
Americans abroad have chastised the State Department’s ambiguity on what measures to take and the lack of guidance from U.S. embassies, which are overwhelmed by thousands of calls for help and already short-staffed given that employees were allowed to evacuate their posts if they felt they were at high risk of negative results from contracting the virus.
State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said the department “has never before undertaken an evacuation operation of such geographic breadth, scale and complexity,” and necessary resources are being used to bring Americans home.
U.S. citizens in remote areas of foreign countries face particular difficulty in finding transportation to any airport with U.S.-bound flights. And the financial burden boosted by the escalating pandemic are of no aid in getting home either.
Ultimately, some travelers see staying in their perpetual vacation locations as last resort.
Questions? Ask us at contact@govsight.co.
Like what you read but prefer to learn with your ears? Listen to the Insight Podcast by GovSight on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podbean every Monday.
Follow GovSight on Twitter @GovSight1, Instagram @govsight and Facebook @GovSight. Go to govsight.com to see how GovSight is making “Citizenship. Simplified.”
