Covid journey restrictions ‘discriminatory’ for Chinese language vacationers: state media

After nearly closing its borders for three years, imposing a strict lockdown regime and relentless testing, Beijing abruptly reversed course on Dec. 7 to live with the virus, which has spread rapidly in recent weeks.

On Friday, South Korea and Spain joined a growing number of countries including the United States, India and others that are skeptical about the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak in China and skeptical of Beijing’s health statistics. Passenger tested for COVID.

Malaysia said it would screen all international arrivals for fever.

“The real intention is to undermine China’s three-year COVID-19 control efforts and attack the country’s system,” the state-run tabloid Global Times said in an article late Thursday, calling the restrictions “baseless ” and “discriminatory”.

China will stop requiring incoming travelers to quarantine from January 8. However, a negative PCR test result within 48 hours of departure will still be required.

China’s top health officials held a videoconference with the World Health Organization on Friday to exchange views on the current outbreak, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement, without elaborating further.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said earlier in the day that the organization needed more information to assess the recent surge in infections in China, but did not take a position on travel testing.

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Not all countries conduct the test. EU member states are particularly divided.

Over the past few days, officials in France, Germany and Portugal have said they see no need for new restrictions at this time, while Austria has highlighted the economic benefits of returning Chinese tourists to Europe.

Before the pandemic, Chinese tourists spent more than $250 billion a year globally.

Spain followed Italy in becoming the second country in the 27-member bloc to require testing of travelers from China, a day after EU health officials failed to agree on a joint course of action.

“At the national level, we will implement airport controls requiring all passengers arriving from China to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test or a complete vaccination course,” Health Secretary Carolina Darias said.

EU health experts are expected to hold a crisis response meeting next week, according to EU sources.

Meanwhile, EU health chief Stella Kyriakides wrote to EU health ministers advising them to immediately expand genome sequencing and wastewater surveillance for COVID-19 infections, including from airports, to detect Any new variants of the Chinese virus surge.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also considering sampling wastewater from international aircraft to track any emerging new variants, the agency told Reuters.

The United States has raised concerns about the potential mutation of the virus and China’s data transparency as it sweeps through the world’s most populous country.

Meanwhile, the German ambassador to Beijing, Patricia Flor, tweeted that a pilot phase of the COVID vaccination campaign for German citizens in China had begun. A shipment of 11,500 doses of BioNTech’s vaccine arrived last week, enough to give one dose each to half of the roughly 20,000 German citizens living in China.

“Excess Mortality”

After widespread protests in November, China’s lifting of restrictions overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes across the country, with scenes of people getting IVs on the side of the road and hearses lining up outside crematoria sparking public concern.

Health experts say China is ill-prepared for the policy U-turn long advocated by President Xi Jinping.

Older people in rural areas may be especially vulnerable due to inadequate medical resources, they said. The risk is heightened by the return of hundreds of millions of people to their hometowns next month for the Lunar New Year.

China, a country of 1.4 billion people, reported one new COVID death on Thursday, the same as the previous day — a figure that doesn’t match what other countries have experienced as they reopen.

Around 9,000 people may die from COVID-19 every day in China, U.K.-based health data company Airfinity said on Thursday. The cumulative death toll in China may have reached 100,000 since Dec. 1, with a total of 18.6 million infections, the report said.

Wu Zunyou, China’s top epidemiologist, said on Thursday that the difference between the death toll in the current infection wave and the same period in years without the pandemic will be studied to calculate “excess mortality” and measure any potential undercounting of deaths from COVID-19 -19 people.