U.S./Canada border closure extended until January 21

U.S. and Canadian officials extended the border closure to non-essential travel until January 21, 2021.

Bill Blair, Canada’s minister of public safety, announced the extension in a December 11 tweet, along with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf also announced the extension in a tweet the same day.

“As this administration continues to make great progress on a vaccine for COVID, we will reevaluate non-essential travel restrictions again early in the new year,” Wolf wrote in a December 11 tweet.

This is the earliest in the month the border closure has been extended since the border first closed in March. It is the ninth monthly border extension since the initial closure on March 21 to contain the spread of Covid-19 between both countries.

“Our decisions will continue to be based on the best public health advice available to keep Canadians safe,” Blair wrote in the tweet, verbatim to his November 19 tweet announcing the previous extension.

The U.S. had 16,113,148 confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to December 14 CDC data. The increase of Covid-19 cases in the U.S. over the past seven days, 1,476,230, is 315 percent of Canada’s total 468,862 confirmed cases during the pandemic, according to CDC and Canadian government data.

The U.S. has a rate of 4,925 confirmed cases per 100,000 people, 395 percent higher than Canada’s rate of 1,247 cases per 100,000, according to the latest data from CDC and Canadian government.