Meanwhile, the small island state of Kiribati that had been isolated since the beginning of the pandemic allowed the first airplane to enter the country. All passengers were vaccinated, all made three separate Covid tests before taking off. Upon landing, 36 tested positive, and an emplyoee of the quarantine center subsequently also tested positive.
**** this goddamn pandemic.
It just goes to show that regardless of how careful you think you're being, a virus like this can never truly be contained in a globally connected world like ours. A great many of these travel measures and restrictions are mere theatre, and a huge drain of money that could be better spent elsewhere (like shoring up our health care systems and training more nurses, etc.).
Canada takes the cake for waste in many ways. Not only do we require every traveler coming in to have an expensive PCR test (rapid/antigen test isn't enough), which is surely lining somebody's pockets somewhere,
we test them all again upon arrival in Canada, on the government's (really, taxpayers) dime!. And only recently has anyone begun to question if this is genuinely a useful way to spend money, or if it's just busy work to make it look like somebody's doing something.
And today we hear that England is just going to roll back ALL COVID measures... mask mandates, vaccine passports, the whole nine yards. The next few months are going to be very interesting.