Update: Coronavirus COVID-19

In the last days the INTOSAI General Secretariat has been contacted by several member SAIs enquiring whether there exists a policy regarding the global outbreak of the coronavirus.

Therefore, the INTOSAI General Secretariat, in coordination with IDI and a medical & travel security services company (International SOS), would like to present to you the following explanations and recommendations:

• Given that INTOSAI is a voluntary organization, all member institutions are free in their decisions regarding their travel behavior. Nevertheless, we would recommend to thoroughly evaluate whether travelling to participate in meetings is necessary within the next weeks/month.
• Our recommendation in general would be to reduce all travel activities to what is strictly necessary and to consider remote participation by video. We would therefore kindly ask the hosts of meetings to offer this possibility, as far as possible.
• As regards strictly necessary travel activities, we would urge you to rigorously adhere to official travel warnings for certain countries, including transit travel through them.
• Another consideration could be to ask – as a temporary policy – participants in INTOSAI events who have visited countries on the travel restriction list not to attend INTOSAI events for a period of 14 days from their departure from the respective location. This would also entail that participants from countries with travel restrictions would not be able to attend the organization's events.

We are fully aware that the situation regarding the outbreak of the coronavirus is changing daily and therefore ask you – for the time being – to monitor the situation before taking any travel decisions.