Coronavirus: US will require travellers from China to test negative for Covid-19 before entering

The US will require travellers arriving from China to test negative for Covid-19 before entering the country, amid concerns over China’s surging cases and a lack of reliable official data on the spread of the coronavirus, federal health officials said on Wednesday. “The United States is taking preventative, proactive steps to protect Americans’ public health,” one of the officials said. “We have just limited information in terms of what’s being shared related to the … cases that are increasing, hospitalisation and especially deaths.” The officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said that the policy would take effect at 12:01am US Eastern Time on January 5, and would apply to all travellers arriving from China – including Hong Kong and Macau – older than 2, regardless of nationality or vaccination status. Travellers will have to submit a negative test, or proof of full recovery of a recent Covid infection, within two days of their departure. The US will also ask passengers flying to the US from Seoul, Toronto and Vancouver if they have been in China during the previous 10 days. If so, they will also have to submit a negative test within two days of their departure to the US. The move came amid growing concern in Washington and elsewhere about China’s spiralling Covid-19 outbreak in recent weeks, which came after Chinese authorities quickly unwound a sprawling network of testing programmes and other pandemic restrictions in place for nearly three years. The US officials said that Chinese authorities have been withholding critical information about the viruses spreading across China right now, and that those viruses could lead to new variants taking hold globally. Could US Covid restrictions on travellers from China raise tensions further? “As of this morning, the percentage of reported cases that are sequenced and shared by the PRC is .036 per cent, compared to about 4.4 per cent of the US cases,” one of the officials said. “We don’t know – we won’t know – the nature of the variants that might be circulating.” Asked about the CDC’s comments, China’s Washington embassy did not address them directly, but spoke broadly about the need for “a science-based” response that would keep cross-border travel and trade operating. “The current Covid situation in the world continues to call for a science-based response approach and joint effort to ensure safe cross-border travel, keep global industrial and supply chains stable, and restore world economic growth,” said Liu Pengyu, the embassy’s spokesman. “Quite a few countries have spoken positively about China’s provisional measures on cross-border travel, and that they hope such travel will further pick up with greater ease,” he added, though he did not identify any by name. The US new policy follows a similar restriction recently instituted in Japan, which require negative Covid-19 test results for any arriving passengers who had been in mainland China in the preceding week. Officially, Beijing has reported only a few thousand new infections each day in China since its zero-Covid policies were eased. But mass testing there ended and asymptomatic cases were excluded from statistics earlier this month, rendering the numbers meaningless. Reports of medicine shortages, overstretched hospitals and emergency services, acute blood shortages and paralysed delivery services suggest the extent of Covid-19 in mainland cities. In a brief statement, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said it would stop releasing data on daily Covid-19 caseloads from Sunday, without providing an explanation. But estimates of daily infections released by local health authorities have shed some light on the situation. In February 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic, arrivals from China were the first passengers to be subject to a US travel ban. Border officials restricted all foreign nationals coming from the country from entering the US. That restriction did not include immediate family members of US citizens and permanent residents, who were expected to quarantine for up to two weeks after arriving in the US. Travellers from China are facing renewed entry restrictions in a slew of locations worldwide as the country’s Covid-19 infection surge continues. Taiwan will start testing all arrivals from the mainland for Covid-19 starting January 1, and keep that protocol in place for at least a month, citing the threat posed by “unclear information” about the contagion’s spread. South Korea, India and Italy have also tightened their rules for visitors from China. The US officials added that they have offered China assistance with efforts to fight the pandemic in the country, but that Chinese authorities had so far declined any help.