Plague Wall
Revisiting the borders of COVID
I wrote this a while back and thought now might be a good time to revisit it, as many Americans are searching for a way out of the rising tide of anti-democratic forces in the US.
Yes, it’s terrible right now, but what if you could never return? What if you were locked out of your home country? Yet, that’s precisely what happened to people everywhere—on ships, vacations, studying abroad—during the pandemic.
Plague Wall: The Borders of COVID (originally published 3/17/2024)
The terminals at Zurich International Airport are long, wide, and new. Despite their ample size, it’s hard to make your way without dodging suitcases, strollers, and the cross-currents of humanity flowing over the concourse to gates, bathrooms, and connections.
But not today.
Instead of crowds, the concourse is vast and empty. You can skip, dance, or run from one end to the other—your path is an open highway, except for a single huddle of people in the distance.
It’s July 2021; the second wave of COVID is behind us, and we are about halfway through the worst of the pandemic. Much of the world remains shut down, including the United States, but if you don’t have family scattered around the globe or, like most people during the pandemic, want nothing to do with overseas travel, you might not notice that beginning in March of 2020, the US instituted a travel ban. It remains in place for 20 months, during which the US refuses entry to foreign travelers from 33 countries, including members of the European Union, where I live.
As a result, when I finally decide to venture back to the US after nearly two years, the country is still closed to all but vaccinated, COVID-negative citizens. However, a little-known, poorly explained exception to the travel ban allows non-US citizens who can prove they have minor children in the States or are married to a US citizen to enter the country. We’ll get to the hell of that in a moment.
My family is split between France, Switzerland, and the US. We are seasoned long-haul travelers; my son has more stamps in his passport than years on the planet. We have seen and flown it all: tiny puddle jumpers that circle until elephants amble off red dirt runways, emergency landings in war zones the Department of State [strongly] suggests we avoid. But we have never seen anything like this: a major international airport devoid of travelers.
From one end to the other, the airport feels staged and artificial, as if plucked from a post-apocalyptic movie set: shuttles, empty; walkways, empty; passport control, empty. It’s the end of the world, and we are what remains: the surviving plague refugees desperate to catch the last flight out. A flight you pray you and yours will get on; otherwise, this is it: you’re stuck, and you are not going home.
Totally empty and not creepy at all…
Borders are not fluid or permeable; they are hard lines with locked doors that open and close at the will of the men and women with guns on either side. You thought it was all one big happy global village, and then a pandemic came along. It was a matter of weeks before all those doors slammed shut, and you were stuck on one side or the other for what, in this case, turned out to be a very long time.
Any expectation that global travel was a given—that you could go anywhere and get back home again—was in tatters. Jet travel was an indispensable part of the calculus of your life if you were going to jump continents, and a global pandemic shot that straight to hell.
You thought you were entitled to go home—that you could and would always be able to get home. Yet, there is no absolute right to cross a border, not even your own.
The idea that you’re unable to return to your home country is quite the shocker; a worm of panic wriggles in your gut at the loss of control and the normal, enough that after the pandemic, many people I know moved back to their home countries as soon as they could. The fear of being locked out was too much.
The consequences of your choice to move, not just across town, but an ocean, two continents, and thousands of miles away, now stand between you and ever seeing home again. It’s not like you’re going to swim or walk.
When we arrive at the empty terminal, my teenage son and I are on our way to San Francisco for a long-overdue visit. We made the hard choice to leave my French husband behind (see: travel ban), a decision I initially questioned but would soon be grateful for. At our gate, we join the little puddle of people pooling onto the shiny, untrodden floors. This is the only flight on the entire concourse and the only flight to the US, not just that day but that week. And getting on it is not a given; are your papers in order?
The number of required travel documents and the lack of clear guidelines from the airlines or the Trump administration make it complicated—and likely an intentional way to discourage non-citizens from entering the country.
Three widely spaced makeshift stations with masked and gloved airline employees are set up to pre-screen us and sort through our paperwork. It’s slow and time-consuming. The gate agents are anxious; they are being asked to serve as health officers and border police, not what they had signed up for. I hold my breath as the gate agent checks our 24-hour COVID tests,1 vaccination certificates, visas, and passports.
When he hands us our boarding passes, I exhale. I am relieved to the point of tears. Still, I keep it together, not wanting to add to the multiple family dramas playing out all around us or further stress out my son, who is sensitive to the feelings of others and would then spend the next 14 hours until we landed worrying about me.
As we look for a place to sit down and wait, a man stands off to the side on his cell phone. His anxious, middle school-aged daughters watch with frightened faces as he tries to explain to someone on the other end of the line where to find the missing documents. I overhear that he’s desperate for the children’s US birth certificates—proof that he, a non-citizen, is their father and can enter the country with them. “Look in the box, no, not in the hall—in the bedroom. The box. No, THE BOX!” he yells into the phone. If whoever is hunting for the documents can’t find them, they won’t get on that plane. One of the girls starts to cry. I know just how she feels. This is awful.
He’s not the only one on the phone. Half a dozen people around me are doing the exact same thing. I move myself and my son away from the scene; plenty of other places to sit and wait for boarding to start where the air doesn’t vibrate with stress. We’re the lucky ones, and I don’t want to wave my good fortune under the noses of anyone who didn’t get the golden ticket.
Take a seat. Any seat.
Years ago, my husband and I were hiking in the south of France and passed by the ruins of the plague wall, the Mur de Peste. A border erected by Louis XV in 1720 to stop an outbreak of the bubonic plague from spreading from the ports in Marseille northward. Back then, it was lined with guard towers, and the soldiers had orders to shoot—at what, I wondered, the virus?
So, how did that pest wall work out? About as well as the travel ban.
More than 300 years later, entire cities in China, Italy, and Korea were cordoned off, and cruise ships were isolated in ports. Imagine the poor souls marooned for 27 days off the coast of Japan when all passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess were quarantined in February 2020, at the start of the pandemic—put under travel restrictions and prevented from returning to the U.S. for another 14 days even after they had left the boat.2
A dear friend, originally from Spain but who lives in New Zealand (which had a total travel ban that excluded entry to even its citizens), was unable to get to his father in Barcelona before he died from COVID in a nursing home. My friend was trapped because if he left New Zealand, the authorities wouldn’t let him back in—back to his family and his life. So, he stayed and never saw his father again.
I wonder if, in the rush to put the hardships of the pandemic behind us, we are pretending to hold the keys to the kingdom, even though we never did. Can you imagine yourself on the cruise ship quarantined in Tokyo Bay, a million miles from home and with no way to return? The hard lesson is that there is no absolute right to repatriate.
Like the ruins of Louis' plague wall, my memory of these events is crumbling, but it remains an artifact of a lesson I do not want to forget.
Families reunite after the travel ban is lifted.
Getting the required 24-hour test before your flight was an expensive and logistical nightmare. For example, if you got your results back at noon on Monday, but your flight was on Tuesday at 8:00 PM, you, my friend, were bang out of luck.
A chilling account of what it was like on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. https://www.wired.com/story/diamond-princess-coronavirus-covid-19-tokyo-bay/
It was an extraordinarily weird period of time, and sometimes I feel like I've just begun processing it. Writing about it is important. Oddly enough, my kids and I traveled back and forth from Istanbul to the US every summer from 2020 through the petering out ends of the pandemic in, shall we say, 2023? and never once during that period were we asked for anything other than negative PCR tests. Never vaccine forms, never anything else. And never at the port of entry. So weird how, despite all the lockstep in rules, there were some majorly disorganized and inconsistent mandates as well.
Yep, I remember that bizarre time during COVID when it got pretty scary for all of us living abroad. The Canadian embassy in Thailand sent me an email saying that I had to go home, to which I responded that I would be unable to since my Scottish husband and son wouldn't be welcome to join me. Luckily, they accepted that as a reason to allow me to stay in Thailand. Crazy!