Can you travel to Mongolia during the COVID-19 epidemic?

You can’t travel to Mongolia as all the international flights, train rides border crossings have been cancelled until April 30th. The border is closed. Limited number of flights have been allowed to repatriate Mongolian citizens from abroad. All the people who have flown to Mongolia on these flights have been placed in 14 day quarantine. As of yesterday (March 26th) the quarantine has been extended and it is now 21 days.

The reason is 10 people who flew to Mongolia and placed in quarantine have been diagnosed positive for COVID-19. Most of the infected have arrived from Europe, and two cases are from South Korea. So far we don’t have infected from China as we closed the border at the beginning of February. There are more than 2,000 people in the quarantine.

It’s a bit ironic that South Korea, Australia and others have started repatriating its citizens back to their own countries. All these countries have thousands of cases of people sick with COVID-19 so repatriating its citizens from a country that doesn’t have any coronavirus in the population is strange, but I guess countries have to do something. We are still repatriating our citizens from South Korea and it looks like we are going to bring in people from Australia.

So now its not a good time to travel. The flights, when they are reinstated, can get canceled and you placed in 21 day quarantine. You might go through another quarantine when you get back to your country as well.

If we start getting confirmed cases in Mongolia the roads between provinces would be closed as it happened several times already. Once, during the Lunar New Year, the other one when we found out that the French citizen who worked here contracted the virus. The whole country was on quarantine for about a week. So you can get stuck in one of the provinces.