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Travel bans expose migrants to Covid, make them potential carriers: Study Research says medium-duration travel bans are counterproductive, for they trap migrants in cities that are Covid-19 hotspots.
As states impose fresh lockdowns of varying durations and intensity to arrest the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study shows that medium-duration travel bans are counterproductive–they trap migrants in cities that are COVID-19 hotspots long enough to expose them to the virus, which they then carry to their home districts. These findings are based on the study of return migration out of Mumbai between March and August 2020, covering the first national lockdown and the subsequent “unlock” phases. The study
also took into account the epidemiological data on the rise in infections in the home districts of the migrant workers. The study by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, whose preprint (non-peer reviewed) version has been published, reached the same conclusion for other developing countries such as Kenya, South Africa, Indonesia, Philippines and China. The researchers used simulations to project the growth of infections in what they called “rural sinks”, or the home districts, of the migrant workers. These showed that shorter travel bans corresponded to fewer infections. During longer bans, infections fell in source cities, again limiting the spread of the pandemic. “For intermediate durations, we risk a situation where we force people to stay in a region of rapidly increasing COVID (cases), and then we allow them to leave at a time when many of them are likely to be infected. This is what creates the finding of intermediate bans being potentially counterproductive,” said Anant Sudarshan, a co-author of the study and the executive director (South Asia) of the Energy Policy Institute.