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The move by some countries to mandate COVID-19 tests for passengers arriving from China reflects global concern that new variants could emerge in the ongoing explosive outbreak — and that governments may not tell the rest of the world fast enough.
There have been no reports of new variants so far, but China has been accused of not being forthcoming about the virus since it first appeared in the country at the end of 2019. Worryingly, it may not show current data on signs of development. strain that could cause new outbreaks elsewhere.
The US, Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Italy have announced testing requirements for passengers from China, with the US citing a spike in infections and what it says is a lack of information, including genomic sequencing of the country’s virus strains. country.
Authorities in Taiwan and Japan have expressed similar concerns.
“Currently the situation of the pandemic in China is not transparent,” Wang Pi-Sheng, head of Taiwan’s epidemic command center, told The Associated Press. “We have a very limited understanding of that information, and it’s not very accurate.”
The island will begin testing all arrivals from China on January 1, before returning an estimated 30,000 Taiwanese for the Lunar New Year holiday later that month.
Japan’s new rules, which restrict flights from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao to designated airports from Friday, have disrupted holiday travel plans.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin noted on Thursday that many countries have not changed their policies for people traveling from China and said any move should treat people from all countries equally.
Each new infection provides a chance for the coronavirus to mutate, and it is spreading rapidly in China. Scientists can’t say whether the surge will unleash new variants of the mutation on the world, but they are worried that it will.
China: ‘We keep no secrets’
Chinese health officials say the current outbreak is being driven by a version of the omicron variant that has also been detected elsewhere, and that a surveillance system has been set up to identify potentially worrying new versions of the virus.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at China’s Centers for Disease Control, said Thursday that China always reports the strains of the virus it finds accurately.
“We don’t keep secrets,” he said. “All works are shared with the world.”
Italy’s health minister told the Senate that sequencing showed that the variant detected in passengers arriving from China had already been in Europe.
“This is the most important and reassuring news,” said Orazio Schillaci.
This is in line with what the executive branch of the European Union has said. The EU refrained Thursday from immediately following member state Italy in requiring tests for visitors from China, but said it was assessing the situation.
More generally, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the body needs more information about the severity of the outbreak in China, especially about hospitals and ICUs, “to make a complete risk assessment of the situation. ground.”
Drug shortages, long lines at Chinese clinics
China lifted many of its tough pandemic restrictions earlier this month, allowing the virus to spread rapidly in a country that has seen few infections since the devastating initial outbreak in the city of Wuhan.
Spiraling infections lead to shortages of cold medicine, long lines at fever clinics, and emergency rooms with capacity to turn away patients.
Cremations have increased several times, with requests from overburdened funeral homes in one city for families to postpone funeral services until next month.
Chinese state media have not reported the fallout from the surge and government officials have blamed Western media for creating the situation.
The global concern, with anger, is a direct result of the ruling Communist Party exiting some of the strictest anti-virus policies in the world, said Miles Yu, director of the China center at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC.
“You can’t do a ‘zero-COVID’ lockdown for a long time, and then suddenly release a lot of infected people from quarantined China into the world,” Yu said in an email. .
Dr David Dowdy, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the US move may be more about increasing pressure on China to share more information than stopping new variants from entering the country.
China has been accused of hiding the virus situation in the country before. An AP investigation found that the government had released genetic information about the virus more than a week after decoding it, frustrating WHO officials.
The government also controls the dissemination of Chinese research on the virus, preventing cooperation with it
international scientist.
Research into the origin of the virus has also been blocked. A WHO expert group said in a report this year that “crucial pieces of data” were missing about how the pandemic started and called for a deeper investigation.
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