Covid-19 has affected traveling and living in general for all countries. Yet every country has taken their own initiatives in dealing with the situations regarding the spread of Covid-19 and pandemic throughout the areas. A few countries have allowed the use of travel while several have denied the use of travel and initiated a complete lockdown scheme on their citizens and residents.
Adapting to this ‘New Normal’ has been one tough job for every one of us and travelling in these new circumstances is a bit of a hassle too with having to quarantine at arrival in one country and then landing back in your home country having to quarantine again.
Travelling has become difficult because carrying face masks to sanitizers to living in constant fear of this deadly virus has got us all paranoid. Amid closed borders and travel restrictions, the overall travel industry came to a halt for a moment when the pandemic peaked.
Now as most travel restrictions are being lifted, people are trying to adjust to this new normal and the travel industry is coming back to life. People are yearning to go to the beaches, the mountains and to just get on the roads, take a plane or a bus and get out of the place they’ve been stuck in since the pandemic first happened.
Daily Life
1. Lockdowns/Curfews:
The impact on the daily lives of people has also caused a lot of depression and crises placed on families and residents of each country. The United Arab Emirates had applied the rules of a curfew which indicated that residents are permitted to leave their respected residences only between the hours of 8 AM – 8 PM.
2. Police Patrolling:
Police patrol is always on the lookout for people breaking the curfew, even for emergency purposes it was required to access and approval from the government application to allow the individual to be excused from breaking the curfew. If an individual had been caught breaking the curfew this person will receive a fine of 3000 AED (Arab Emirati Dirham) directly on their ID card.
3. Work From Home:
Since not every person has work between those particular hours the contingencies made were either if it were so as necessary for the person to attend work for later hours, they be given a government approval. Other than that a bunch of major companies had started wherever it was applicable to assign a work from home status. Industries that had hit a major cutback from the pandemic included the Logistics-Shipping along with the Aviation industries. Suffering huge losses and causing big numbers of people being fired or reducing base salaries to a bare 50% of the initial.
Traveling Abroad
Traveling not only depends on the country that you reside in but also factors in the country that you are traveling to. Initially you’ll have to check the rules that are required for one to leave the country, whether or not they’ll allow a flight back or not. Due to a lot of flights carrying the Covid-19 virus and many mutated variants of it, policies have been made to shut down airfields of return or completely shut off any sort of travel.
1. Travel Restrictions:
A lot of countries now have allowed traveling, they require a few things. A PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test which is done by a nasal swab to detect covid in your DNA. Another thing required is the particular vaccinations applicable and permitted by the country that you are travelling to. Placing an example of traveling from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, it is required to show proof of a government stamped card along with government approved application that show you are currently vaccinated and the particular vaccine that you have received.
2. Vaccination:
The United Arab Emirates provides three vaccines that are Sinopharm, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Hayat. But that does not mean that the United States approves of all these vaccines, because they are only serving Sinopharm, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson.
Therefore the approved vaccine of an individual travelling from the United Arab Emirates to the United States will be allowed to travel as long as a Negative (not detected) PCR Covid test has been attained along with a government approved vaccination card of the vaccines Sinopharm and Pfizer.
Conclusion:
While there are many travel restrictions with countries closing their borders, others put countries in categories i.e., which countries are safe to travel to, which are not so safe and some completely banned travelling to and from. This does not mean that this procedure is based for each and every country. The regulations for people traveling to Pakistan have a different course of action compared to the people traveling to the United States. For most of the time the people that have traveled to countries of the South Asian Subcontinent have been stuck due to closing of flights, the reason being the mutated variants of Covid-19.
If the feasible conditions have been met of traveling to and back of the desired destination then the travel purpose may be recommended otherwise sit back and stay safe during the pandemic.