Utah requires all who enter state to fill out coronavirus survey - on the honor system

Anyone traveling to Utah will be required to complete a COVID-19 survey, Gov. Gary Herbert said.

Herbert issued an order Wednesday that anyone 18 years or older entering the state will have to complete a “COVID-19 travel declaration form,” starting Friday, according to a tweet from the governor.

“This will be required at the airport, and on our roadways,” Herbert said. “The travel declaration will ask individuals if they have been tested for COVID-19 and if they are experiencing any symptoms of coronavirus. It also asks where they have recently been traveling.”

There are currently no plans to punish people who do not complete the declaration, according to Utah’s COVID-19 Community Task Force.

“This is not an effort to penalize people. This is an effort to inform,” officials said. “We can take stricter steps if we need to, but when people know the right thing, they tend to do the right thing.”

Nine locations along the state’s border will be “geotargeted” with an alert, according to the task force.. Many of those entry points are located on major freeways, such as Interstate-15 in Arizona and Idaho, KSL reported.

Drivers will receive an emergency alert once they cross into Utah, the task force said.

At the Salt Lake City International Airport, passengers leaving planes will be handed cards with similar messages to the alerts, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

Herbert said the declaration is an effort to make sure people infected with COVID-19 aren’t “out spreading that to anybody else. And that will take some efforts on our part to make sure that people are quarantined appropriately,” he said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 2:55 PM with the headline "Utah requires all who enter state to fill out coronavirus survey - on the honor system."