Biden to review Covid travel ban ‘week to week’

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks on the economy during an event at the South Court Auditorium at Eisenhower Executive Office Building on November 23, 2021 in Washington, DC. President Biden announced the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of the Department of Energy to combat high energy prices which are at a seven-year high across the nation prior to the holiday travel season. Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFP (Photo by ALEX WONG / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)

MINNEAPOLIS, United States (AFP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he would decide on a weekly basis whether to extend US travel bans on southern Africa, depending what happens with the worrying new Omicron variant of Covid-19.

Asked how long travel restrictions that took effect Monday on South Africa and seven other southern African countries would remain in place, Biden said it “kind of depends.”

The US president, who was boarding Air Force One at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, said he would see “week to week to determine what we need, the state of affairs.”

“We’re going to learn a lot more in the next couple weeks about the lethality of this virus, about how much it spreads, what we have to control it, etcetera,” he told reporters.

Asked if any expansion of the travel restrictions to other countries could be made suddenly, as happened under former Republican president Donald Trump, Biden said: “Unlike Trump I don’t shock our allies.”

© Agence France-Presse