NEW YORK — Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin visited John F. Kennedy International Airport on Saturday to see one of the nation’s first air travel COVID-19 monitoring programs sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The program, which is a partnership between the CDC and companies XpresCheck and Ginkgo Bioworks, is being called a bio surveillance program to help monitor and track new variants like omicron. It provides free COVID-19 testing to international travelers arriving from select countries.

New York state is hoping this will allow health officials to combat the spread of the omicron variant more effectively ahead of the holiday season. The program is also performing viral sequencing on positive test samples to help detect occurrences of the omicron variant. The goal is to quickly alert public health authorities to specific concerning changes with the virus.

“The detection of the omicron variant among arriving travelers, and the subsequent rapid public health interventions that followed, demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of this collaborative airport-based surveillance testing program,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, the director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the CDC.

As of now, according to a CDC order, international travelers must show a negative COVID-19 test taken no more than one day before traveling to the U.S., regardless of vaccination status. But all foreign travelers coming here must be fully vaccinated.

President Joe Biden also announced that a federal mask mandate requiring travelers to wear masks in airports, on planes and on other modes of public transportation has been extended through March. The travel ban of eight southern African countries continues to stay in effect.

Travelers say it’s harder to travel with all of the new requirements, but are happy to see more measures to keep them healthy.

“I mean, it can be frustrating, it can be difficult. It can make things hard. I nearly didn’t board my flight because of the delay in getting my results back," said Tania Mann, a traveler arriving from Sri Lanka. "But I don’t object to that, because this is the situation we’re in, and you can’t cut corners on the testing we’re doing."

"I don’t resent it at all," Mann added. "It’s a first-world problem to be inconvenienced by something like that right now."