Beijing threatens response to toughened COVID measures for Chinese travelers
BEIJING — The Chinese government blasted coronavirus testing requirements imposed on travelers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved, which include the U.S. and several European nations.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily news briefing Tuesday.
“We are firmly opposed to attempts to manipulate the COVID measures for political purposes and will take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity,” she said.
The comments were China’s sharpest to date on the issue. Australia and Canada this week joined a growing list of countries requiring travelers from China to take a coronavirus test prior to boarding their flight, as China battles a nationwide outbreak after abruptly easing restrictions that were in place for much of the pandemic.
Other countries including the U.S., Britain, India, Japan and several European nations have announced tougher COVID-19 measures for travelers from China amid concerns over a lack of data on infections in China and fears of the possibility that new variants may emerge.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne defended the tests. Starting Wednesday, anyone flying from China to France will have to present a negative coronavirus test taken within the previous 48 hours and be subject to random testing on arrival.
As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID-19 wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed
“We are in our role, my government is in its role, protecting the French,” Borne said Tuesday on France-Info radio.
Britain will require passengers from China to take a COVID test before boarding the plane from Thursday. Transport Secretary Mark Harper said the requirement was aimed at “collecting information” because Beijing wasn’t sharing coronavirus data.
Health officials will test a sample of passengers when they arrive in the U.K., but no quarantine is required for those who test positive, he said.
“The policy for arrivals from China is primarily about collecting information that the Chinese government is not sharing with the international community,” Harper told the LBC radio station Tuesday.
First-time protesters in China grapple with how much agency they can wrest from an authoritarian government after the largest demonstrations since 1989.
Sweden’s Public Health Agency said Tuesday that it had urged the Swedish government to require travelers from China to present a recent negative coronavirus test.
The statement from the agency comes as Stockholm, which has taken over EU’s rotating presidency, has called a meeting of the EU’s crisis management mechanism for Wednesday in Brussels, where travel restrictions will be discussed with the aim of agreeing on a common line.
The Swedish government “is preparing to be able to introduce travel restrictions. At the same time, we are conducting a dialogue with our European colleagues to get the same rules as possible in the EU,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer said in a statement.
Austria, too, plans to test the wastewater of all planes arriving from China for new variants of the coronavirus, the Austria Press Agency reported Tuesday, following a similar announcement by Belgium a day earlier.
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Chinese health officials said last week that they had submitted data to GISAID, a global platform for sharing coronavirus data.
The versions of the virus fueling infections in China “closely resemble” those that have been seen in different parts of the world between July and December, GISAID said Monday.
Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies viruses at the Christian Medical College of Vellore in India, said that the information from China, albeit limited, seemed to suggest that “the pattern was holding” and that there wasn’t any sign of a worrisome variant emerging.
Mao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said that health authorities had recently held a video conference with the World Health Organization to exchange views on the current COVID situation, medical treatment, vaccination and other technical issues, and agreed to continue technical exchanges to help end the pandemic as soon as possible.
The experience of human rights lawyer Wang Yu shows that China’s cellphone health apps can become another tool of social and political control.
A senior Hong Kong official also criticized the steps taken by some countries to apply the travel testing requirements to passengers from Hong Kong and Macao, both semi-autonomous Chinese territories.
Hong Kong Chief Secretary Eric Chan said in a Facebook post that the government had written to various consulates Monday to express its concerns over the “unnecessary and inappropriate” rules.
Some Canadian experts have questioned the effectiveness of the testing. Kerry Bowman, assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, said that people can test positive long after entering the country.
The requirement is “not based on science at this point,” he said after Canada announced measures last weekend.
China, which for most of the pandemic adopted a “zero-COVID” strategy that imposed harsh restrictions aimed at stamping out the virus, abruptly eased those measures in December.
Chinese authorities previously said that starting Jan. 8, people traveling from overseas would no longer need to quarantine upon arriving in China, paving the way for Chinese residents themselves to go abroad and return.
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