COVID-19 and the impact on travel health advice.

I write this on the morning after the World Health Organization reported a record for global coronavirus cases, with 230,370 new cases recorded in 24 hours. Most of the new cases were in the Americas, the details can be found on the WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard at https://covid19.who.int/.

The other platform for global statistics which is kept up to date in real time is the COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 which shows global cases almost at 13 million and 569,128 deaths around the world.

We know the travel industry has been impacted beyond any scale imaginable at the start of 2020 and recovery of such services are vital for economies around the world. Here in England we have been easing a lockdown over a number of weeks albeit with different timings and rulings within the four countries of the United Kingdom. As our ‘travel corridors’ open up again, the government has published and updates guidance regularly at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-travel-corridors#countries-and-territories-with-no-self-isolation-on-arrival-in-england, but provides links for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland for their specific advice, it becomes very confusing. Our Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) continues to advise against non-essential international travel, except to countries and territories exempt from advice against ‘all but essential’ international travel. Travel insurance is a vital consideration before travelling abroad and even more so during these unpredictable times, and we are certainly advised to take it out https://www.gov.uk/guidance/foreign-travel-insurance. However, many insurers stopped selling travel insurance after the start of the pandemic but since then, some companies have restarted, with many not covering anything that is coronavirus-related. ‘Which?’ is a UK based Consumers' Association and has published an article to help navigate through the complexity of the subject at https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/07/coronavirus-what-it-means-for-your-travel-insurance/.

Travel medicine services have also been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and there is concern in the UK that many of the smaller independent travel clinics run by well qualified practitioners may not survive the loss in their businesses. This may impact the quality of travel services in the future. Much of our care is also provided in a primary care setting where workloads are even more intense not only with a backlog of work not undertaken during the crisis of COVID-19 in this country, but the complexity of day to day working requiring stringent infection control measures including use of PPE complicates the matter. These settings will be struggling to return to any normal level of travel medicine provision. Guidance from the Faculty of Travel Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow can be read at https://rcpsg.ac.uk/documents/publications/covid-19/1412-covid-tm-guidance-statement-0720/file.

I should imagine a similar situation is happening in many countries around the world. However, although it may not be easy to imagine right now, travel will return to full capacity in the future and the protection of travellers and that of pre travel health care will be even more vital. And, hopefully if vaccine trials around the world prove successful and vaccine become available, then massive immunisation campaigns will be required. Who better to help provide this care than travel medicine practitioners, who possess all the skills required to undertake such a task.