The key, experts say, will be weighing the risk of new variants against economic benefits and the need to resume normal life. Laura Albert, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said the United States has reached a point where it can start to contemplate how it might reopen more widely, including to more travelers from abroad.
“We’re in a different place than we were a year ago,” said Albert, whose work focuses on analyzing risk in public spaces. “Last year, it was, ‘No, don’t do it.’ It wasn’t clear it was safe to be on a plane. This year, it’s how and where you go, not whether.”
Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at Wisconsin, said travel always has been linked with the spread of viruses, but as more people are vaccinated, the risk is reduced. The wild card, however, is the possibility of new variants.