Though the Canadian border is closed to the United States, a loophole allows Americans to travel to and from Alaska, providing they use a direct route, quarantine at hotels and refrain from visiting national parks, leisure sites or tourist attractions.
Separately, a 28-year-old woman in Australia was sentenced to six months in jail on Tuesday after she hid in the back of a truck on a cross-country journey of more than 1,800 miles from the state of Victoria, a coronavirus hot spot, to Western Australia. The police said that she was picked up by her partner at a gas station.
The woman had traveled to Victoria to care for her sister and had received an exemption to fly back to Western Australia, which has closed its borders to travelers, her lawyer told a court. But the exemption did not apply to travel by road, and she pleaded guilty to breaking the order.
Western Australia’s pandemic rules include a 14-day mandatory quarantine for most travelers in a hotel, and the penalties for breaking them range from prison terms as long as 12 months to as much as $35,000 in fines.
Australia has had 549 deaths and more than 25,000 confirmed cases as of Wednesday, according to a Times database. Many of its state borders are closed because of the recent outbreak in Victoria, where the state capital, Melbourne, remains under lockdown.
Victoria’s latest outbreak has been linked to breaches in a quarantine hotel, but people around the country have been trying to circumvent virus-related restrictions anyway.
Last month, four men in their 20s were found hiding on an interstate freight train heading from Melbourne to Perth, on the country’s west coast. The police have also issued citations to travelers from hot spots like Sydney for lying on border declaration forms.
Reporting was contributed by Katrin Bennhold, Alexander Burns, Choe Sang-Hun, Mike Ives, Isabella Kwai, Apoorva Mandavilli, Jonathan Martin, Patricia Mazzei, Heather Murphy, Campbell Robertson, Simon Romero, Anna Schaverien, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Katherine J. Wu.