We did not analyze second-order benefits from screening, such as potential to raise awareness. Official recommendations emphasize that screening is an opportunity for ‘risk communication’ in which travellers can be instructed how to proceed responsibly if symptoms develop at the destination (World Health Organization, 2020d). Alongside increased general surveillance/alertness in healthcare settings, such measures could help reduce the risk of local transmission and superspreading, but their quantitative effectiveness is unknown. Once limited local transmission has begun, arrival screening could still have merit as a means to restrict the number of parallel chains of transmission present in a country. Once there is generalized spread which has outpaced contact tracing, departure screening to prevent export of cases to new areas will be more valuable than arrival screening to identify additional incoming cases. Altogether, screening should not be viewed as a definitive barrier to case importation, but used alongside on-the-ground response strategies that help reduce the probability that any single imported case spreads to cause a self-sustaining local epidemic. The cost-benefit tradeoff for any screening policy should be assessed in light of past experiences, where few or no infected travellers have been detected by such programs (Gostic et al., 2015).