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WASHINGTON — President Trump raised fresh questions surrounding his response to the coronavirus on Thursday by saying that Americans in Europe will be tested before they are allowed to board flights and that they will not be allowed to come home if they test positive — a direct contradiction of Vice President Mike Pence’s claim on the morning talkers that all Americans can come home “regardless” of their condition.
“If an American is coming back or anybody is coming back, we’re testing. We have a tremendous testing set up,” Trump told reports in the Oval Office. “We are not putting them on planes if they’re — if it shows positive.”
On Wednesday night, Trump announced a sweeping 26-country travel ban as cases soar in Europe.
On Thursday morning, Pence, Trump’s point person on the crisis, said all Americans would be allowed to return.
“I’d leave that decision to every family, but there is no barrier to their kids or any American coming home,” Pence said during a Fox News appearance. “They’ll go through a process, they will self quarantine, but they can all come home.”
Pence said Americans “will be funneled as we say through a series of 13 different airports and then we’ll ask them to self-quarantine regardless of their symptoms or what their condition might be.”
The White House and Pence’s office did not immediately respond to request for comment on airport screening on returning Americans, and whether they will be tested before boarding planes to the US.
It’s not the first point of confusion in the travel ban rollout.
During his initial announcement from the Oval Office, Trump said the ban would apply to shipments of cargo. He later said on Twitter the restrictions applied to “people not goods.”
Trump’s sweeping travel ban came after US cases of COVID-19 topped 1,200 and deaths hit 38.
The travel ban takes effect Friday night and will block entry of foreigners who visited the Schengen region — the zone that allows for travel without restrictions or passport controls, including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
It doesn’t cover travel from nations outside of the zone, including the United Kingdom, Ireland and many Eastern European nations like Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia in the past 14 days.
