View of signs leading to one of the test centers at Heathrow Airport on 22 December 2020 in London, England.
Joseph Okpako | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The United States will begin requiring people flying in from the UK to test negative for Covid-19 no later than 72 hours before departure, the CDC said in a statement late Thursday.
The news comes after the UK said earlier in the week that it had identified a new strain of Covid-19 that appears to be spreading faster. The CDC said President Donald Trump will sign the order on Friday, Christmas Day, and the measure will take effect starting Monday.
The CDC said passengers were required to provide airlines with documentation of their laboratory results from polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or antigen tests.
Airlines also had to prove that passengers tested negative before boarding, the agency said. They also had to prevent passengers from boarding if they refused to take a test.
Earlier in the week, Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways began asking passengers to pass a negative test before boarding a plane bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. United Airlines also rejects negative test results for passengers flying from London Heathrow to its hubs in Newark, New Jersey, Washington DC, or Chicago.
The new pressure prompted dozens of countries to swiftly restrict travel from the UK in efforts to prevent pressure from entering their own borders. The US had already banned travel from the UK in March, banning foreigners who had been in the country in the past two weeks.
The World Health Organization, however, said the new variant was found in Australia, Denmark, Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands.
Earlier this week, the CDC suggested that the new strain could have already circulated in the unidentified U.S.. Although the variant has not yet been detected in the country, the CDC noted that the U.S. has only followed a fraction of Covid’s diseases.