On Friday, the US announced the end of passengers needing to have a negative Covid test before flying to the US. This, unfortunately, happened about an hour before Shabbos and almost caused my phone to have a meltdown from the large number of calls and messages from people who had booked antigen tests with me for Saturday night, after the end of Shabbat. It certainly caused the last hour before Shabbat started to be WAY more stressful than I would prefer.....
On Saturday night, we worked out all the details of who definitely needed to test (those flying before 7:01 a.m. Sunday, Israel time [aka midnight US time], those who tested just because they were concerned that someone at the airport might not have read the memo (mostly people flying Sunday morning) and the vast majority who said "Yippee!" and canceled their tests.
I just flew to visit my mother a few weeks ago, when the mask mandate was undergoing big changes: when I flew out, no masks were required in Ben Gurion airport (I wore one), but when we lined up to board, everyone had to wear a mask from then until landing (although they were MUCH less strict about it than any other time I've flown during Covid). When I returned home four days later, I left Boston at 8:30 pm. At midnight, the mask mandate for air travel was expiring in Israel. Would masks be required for the first half of the flight? Nah. El Al took the easy way out and masks were not required on the entirety of the return flight (I wore one [seeing a trend?!]).
Mandatory covid testing had stopped two weeks before my return home. It was really nice to have "the circle" that one enters at Ben Gurion upon leaving baggage claim once again have people around it waiting for arriving travelers. And, no matter how well-run and quick the covid testing process was (and it was!!), it was great to just exit the airport without doing anything else.
Had I been asked, though, I would have suggested that the governments involved wait a bit longer to get rid of testing. There have been a LOT of changes in the last month or two, and what have we seen? A very large rise in covid infections (likely vastly under-counted because, hey, relatively few people need to get tested for anything any more).
In the meantime, I'm taking early early retirement ;)
