US to ban most travel from India amid COVID-19 spike

The Biden administration will ban most travel from India starting Tuesday amid a surge in coronavirus cases in the country.

“The policy will be implemented in light of extraordinarily high COVID-19 caseloads and multiple variants circulating in the India,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

The move comes on top of international travel restrictions already in place requiring people to have a negative test result before coming to the United States. The move is not expected to apply to U.S. citizens.

The coronavirus outbreak in India has worsened considerably over the past weeks. New cases in the country have spiked to more than 380,000 in a single day, according to figures from Our World in Data.

Other debates on the global response: The White House has also been deliberating over a proposal backed by India to waive COVID-19 vaccine patents at the World Trade Organization, which supporters argue would give greater access to vaccines to lower-income countries.

Psaki said earlier this week the administration had not made a decision on whether to support the waiver, and was weighing how best to help provide vaccines to the rest of the world.