New Bookmarks for Safer Travels

By Robert McGarvey

Used to be, as I planned a trip, I’d look at a weather report for the destination and, in very special cases, I’d consult a crime report for a foreign destination at the US Dept. of State.  That about did it for my information curiosities and, note, I don’t believe I ever consulted crime data for US cities, only for some international cities.

But now as I find myself contemplating travel to several destinations, both domestic and foreign, I suddenly want more data – and that is why I am creating new travel bookmarks that I will share with you because you just may have similar needs.

The big difference in my 2021-2022 travel planning: disease, particularly Covid-19, looms large in my thinking.  There are places I just will not go to because I would not feel safe and, yes, I am dually vaccinated. Plus I had the disease 15 months ago so I have antibodies and probably am resistant to Covid-19.

But resistant to all variants? To new strains?  I don’t know and I am not going to risk a trip to a place where I might run into a Covid variant I have no immunity to.

About 5% of the world’s population presently is fully vaccinated – which means 95% aren’t.  It is going to take at least a couple years to distribute vaccines widely and that is a wildly optimistic estimate.  

That means international travel will slowly rebound and it will be on a destination by destination basis.  

Bookmark this page via Statista that shows Covid infection and death rates by country and offers fine tuned date for the last 7 days.  Places I don’t want to go to right now include Hungary, Peru, and Brazil –  too many cases, too many deaths.

What about India?  It happens not to be on the Statista page I am looking at today and that’s important to understand,  No site I am aware of is comprehensive – all crunch data using their own methods and own feeds. So you have to look at multiple sites.

But any reader of the international news knows India is afire with Covid-19 and the end does not appear near. It is one of the scariest places on the planet right now.

And then there are countries that have released no data.  Tanzania is a case in point and I know I won’t even think about traveling to a place where its Covid infections and deaths are state secrets (or, even worse, just not counted).  Sadly, much of the undeveloped world fits into that category.  They are not hiding information so much as they just don’t know their incidence rate, death count, or when vaccines will be available to their populace.  

Another, useful tool is from the Lowy Institute and it allows us to compare countries in terms of Covid responses.  Search for Portugal and Spain, for instance, and to my eyes their Covid patterns have been quite similar. That’s useful to know especially since many of us are probably weighing options for either/or trips – Jamaica vs Dominican Republic, for instance, and today the differences seem minimal.

Of course the facts are fluid.  Countries that once seemed to have Covid under control now are messes. The Seychelles is a case in point; it had ranked among the most vaccinated countries.  But a majority of the people had gotten China’s Sinopharm vaccine and questions swirl around its efficacy. Now there are lots of active cases in the Seychelles. It’s not a place I would visit.

But fluid facts mean we have to check frequently.  Last week’s reassuring research may take a deadly turn today. Or a country with a bad bout of Covid infections may turn a corner.

Another new twist for me: I plan to check US infection and vaccination stats before traveling to domestic destinations.  Some parts of the country just are stubbornly anti-vax and while I won’t argue with them, I also won’t mingle with them.

That’s why I’ve bookmarked a widget at Becker’s Hospital Review that shows the percentage of a state’s population that has been vaccinated. Mississippi and Alabama bring up the rear but that’s no surprise. They have vaccinated fewer than one in three.

Also useful is a CDC Covid tracker that lets us drill into county specific infection incidence data across the US.  Get specific when looking. Incidence can multiply within a few miles.  

Do I enjoy this data crunching?  I do not.  But I would enjoy being bed-ridden with an encore battle against Covid even less.

But at least, data in view, I am newly confident about traveling.  I just plan to do it as the numbers guide me.