ICAP’s senior technical director, Jessica Justman, MD, is featured in a March 14 New York Times article answering questions about travel during the coronavirus pandemic:

States of emergency are used by local and state governments to help them shift funding, as well as to have the authority to close schools and other facilities.

Those additional powers also mean that travel could be restricted, if the state or local government thought it necessary, said Jessica Justman, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

“That flexibility that the government then gains might allow the government to lay out certain policies and those policies in turn could easily affect what an individual can do or not do.”

…

Dr. Justman said there were two things to think about: “Who you are and who is in your network.”

If you spend a lot of time around older people or someone who has a chronic illness — sections of the population at a higher risk of the coronavirus — traveling domestically would pose a risk to them. But for younger people who are not around those two groups of people, she said: “It’s going to be easier for them to decide to go and visit other cities.”

Read the full article on the New York Times website

Read the latest ICAP updates on COVID-19 here