[addicted44]

Well, before this year there wasn't a global pandemic. That's really meaningless. This wouldnt be an issue if it had happened last year, or the year before, or the year before...1918.

The point is that any functional government would have accounted for the fact that there is a global pandemic, which if nothing else, might actually make it impossible for some students to even leave the US, before publishing this guidance.

Edit: Also, this is a deliberate undoing of a temporary allowance they had already made. From the first sentence of the linked document:

> Temporary procedural adaptations related to online courses permitted by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) during the height of the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)crisis will be modified for the fall 2020 semester.