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The US announced new COVID-19 testing requirements Wednesday for all travelers from China, joining other countries that have imposed restrictions due to rising infections.
Starting January 5, all people traveling to the US from China must take a COVID-19 test no later than two days before traveling and provide a negative test before boarding the plane. The test is for anyone who is two years of age or older.
Canada has not implemented new testing requirements for people arriving from China.
Ellen Kennedy, spokeswoman for Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, said Canada is monitoring the number of COVID-19 cases and following the advice of public health officials.
“Currently, travelers are not required to submit to a COVID-19 test upon arrival in Canada, but we continue to monitor the situation and keep Canadians safe,” Kennedy said in an email to CBC News.
Concerns about possible new variants
In a statement explaining the tests, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cited the increase in infections and what it said was a lack of sufficient and transparent information from China, including genomic sequences about the strains of the virus circulating in the country.
“These data are critical to effectively monitor the surge in cases and reduce the likelihood of the introduction of new variants of concern,” the CDC said.
Some scientists are concerned that the COVID-19 outbreak in China could release a new variant of the coronavirus into the world that may not be the same as the one currently circulating. This is because every infection is another opportunity for the virus to mutate.
“What we want to avoid is having a variant enter the US and spread like we saw with delta or omicron,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
But the CDC’s actions may be less about stopping new variants from crossing the U.S. border and more about increasing pressure on China to share more information, Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, added hope. restrictions “not kept in place longer than they should.”
“I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on reducing the spread of COVID-19,” Dowdy said. “We have a lot of transmission of COVID-19 here at our border.”
Early warning program
Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, agreed that China had not shared enough genomic sequence information. But he also said the U.S. had become complacent about the sequence and needed to redouble its own efforts.
The CDC also announced the expansion of an early warning program that tests volunteers at selected airports for new and rare variants of the coronavirus. The program will expand airports in Seattle and Los Angeles.
General COVID-19 testing rules will apply to people traveling from China via third countries and to people connecting via the US when traveling to other destinations. Anyone who tests positive more than 10 days before a flight can provide documentation showing that they have recovered from COVID-19 instead of a negative test result.
It will be up to the airline to confirm the negative test and documentation.
Japan, India among those requiring testing
In an abrupt policy shift, China this month began dismantling the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdown regime and extensive testing, putting its battered economy on course to reopen next year.
Lifting the restrictions, after widespread protests against them, means that COVID-19 is spreading largely unchecked and could infect millions of people every day, according to some international health experts.
Beijing has faced international criticism that official COVID-19 data and death tolls are inconsistent with the scale of the outbreak. An international modeling group has predicted China could experience two million deaths or more.
Other countries have taken similar measures to prevent infections from spreading beyond China’s borders. Japan requires a negative COVID-19 test on arrival for travelers from China, and Malaysia announced new tracking and surveillance measures. India, South Korea and Taiwan require virus tests for visitors from China.
The Lunar New Year, which begins on January 22, is usually China’s busiest travel season, and China announced on Tuesday it will resume issuing passports for tourism for the first time since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The US action is a return to the requirements for some international travelers. The Biden administration lifted that last mandate in June. At the time, the CDC continued to recommend that people flying to the US get tested near the time of departure and not travel if they are sick.
At the start of the pandemic, the US banned entry to foreigners traveling from China, weeks after the virus first emerged there three years ago. Americans were allowed to return home and flights from China were diverted to selected airports where passengers were screened for illness.
But the virus has spread in the US among people with no history of travel.
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