COVID-19: North & Central Asia border closures and travel restrictions
This thread is ment to exchange information about
- travel restrictions in Central Asia due to the Corona virus/Covid-19
- any other news about Corona in these countries.
Our original plan is to travel through the STANs and Russia from April to autumn. We still stick to it, but chances are high that closed borders or similar obstacles might influence our trip.
Right now I am aware of two border restrictions:
- Russia closed their border to China and to Mongolia last week. The first could be read "everywhere", the second was reported by two seperate German motorcycle travellers.
- The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced this on their offical page:
On 18.02.2020 Kazakstan introduced preventive measurments against Corona:
1) Charantine in hospital for travellers, who´ve been to China in the last 14 days.
2) Limitation of travel-freedom / kind of "soft" charantine for people who visited countries with sigificant numbers of infections within the last 14 days (e.g. Singapur, Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Iran, Northkorea, Southkorea and Italy)
3) Travellers from countries with insignificant numbers of infections have to be available for 24 days for medical inspection (remote monitoring).
The latest might be a bad translation by me and I have no further information of how this remote monitoring might work. But I have a feeling that our kind of travelling = zigzaging through the contry without a fixed agenda/route, including bushcamping, is not what they would allow these days.
Beside the risk of not being allowed into one of the countries I see the danger of an outbrake in one of them while we are there. In consequence Russia will most likely close their borders, which would block our way back home.
Underdeveloped countries like Tadjikistan und Kyrgystan are neighbours of China and once the virus is there, they have not the resources to cope with it. Thereby it will spread rapidly in those countries.
Cheers
Panny
Last edited by Chris Scott; 14 Mar 2020 at 18:22.
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