ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is calling on U.S. Customs and Border Protection to require international travellers to test negative for the coronavirus before boarding flights to the United States, or allow the state’s Port Authority to take on that role.
The governor’s request comes as a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus is spreading in the United Kingdom and has been discovered in New York. The governor called on airlines to require confirmation of a passenger’s negative COVID-19 test prior to boarding, but Cuomo does not have authority to mandate airlines to take those precautions and thus was only able to convince a select few airlines to confirm a negative test voluntarily.
New York confirmed its first case of the U.K. variant on Monday in a man who worked at a jewelry store in Saratoga Springs, and Cuomo and state health Commissioner Howard Zucker have both acknowledged that