Beijing Calls for Measured, Science-Based Response to Its Covid Outbreak
More countries impose travel restrictions on arrivals from China over fears a more dangerous variant may emerge from the country’s wave of infections
HONG KONG—Beijing called on foreign governments to abide by scientific principles in setting travel protocols, after the U.S. joined a growing group of countries that are imposing Covid-screening measures on travelers from China.
On Wednesday, the U.S. said it would require travelers arriving from China to show negative Covid test results or documents proving their recovery from a recent infection. Federal health officials cited concerns over a lack of accurate data from Beijing that can be used to detect new coronavirus variants that may be emerging from the outbreaks now raging across the Chinese mainland.
Until early December, China had maintained the world’s strictest Covid-testing regime for nearly three years, and it only recently said it would lift compulsory quarantine for inbound travelers. Some foreign governments have raised concerns over the speed at which Beijing dropped its “zero-Covid” strategy. The about-face came shortly after public protests erupted against the government’s use of mass virus testing and strict lockdowns—which were designed to hunt down and isolate outbreaks, but have also throttled commerce in the world’s second-largest economy.
Amid the shift, Beijing ended mass virus testing and scaled back its reports of new infections. The World Health Organization this week said it needed more information from China to make an accurate assessment of risks from the outbreak.
The U.S. measures mirror pandemic-screening protocols imposed during recent days by several governments in Asia and Europe—including Japan, India and Italy. Washington’s move comes as governments prepare for a surge in Chinese arrivals after Beijing said that from Jan. 8 it will lift border controls that led to the almost three-year collapse in outbound tourism.
Some European Union officials called for joint action in response to the Covid situation in China, and the bloc’s Health Security Committee, an informal advisory body, met Thursday to discuss the matter, according to tweets from an account run by the EU’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry, which once vocally criticized foreign governments for restricting travel to and from China during the early weeks of the pandemic, offered a more measured response to the latest testing requirements imposed on travelers originating from the country.
“China has always believed that all countries, in adopting Covid-control measures, should do so in a science-based and proportionate manner, without affecting normal people-to-people exchanges,” ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters Thursday.
Beijing hopes that all countries can work together in ensuring safe cross-border travel, “safeguard the stability of global industrial supply chains, and contribute to international solidarity in fighting the pandemic and fostering a global economic recovery,” Mr. Wang said.
On Chinese social media, reactions to the new screening protocols appeared varied. Some users condemned what they saw as discriminatory and unscientific measures against China, while others expressed acceptance that other nations were, in some ways, doing what their own government had been doing since early in the pandemic.
“What’s there to criticize? In the past two years when other countries were opening up, were we not strict in our policies of PCR testing and quarantining people who enter our borders?” one user wrote on the popular Weibo microblogging platform. “Which country doesn’t act in its own interests?”
Hospitality businesses, meanwhile, remained hopeful that the screening measures wouldn’t deter an influx of Chinese tourists, who had been the biggest prepandemic source of travel expenditure, having spent an estimated $255 billion globally in 2019, according to data from the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization.
Trip.com Group, an online travel service based in China, said outbound-flight bookings from the mainland on Tuesday morning more than tripled when compared with the preceding day, with Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Thailand among the top destinations. Bookings to the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Australia also grew, it said.
Geoff Freeman, president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association, a Washington-based nonprofit representing members of the travel industry, described the new measures as highly targeted and reasonable. “We look forward to welcoming Chinese travelers back to the United States,” he said in a statement.
As part of China’s dismantling of zero-Covid policies, authorities have said they would end quarantine measures on inbound travelers and start allowing citizens to apply for passports again on Jan. 8—essentially reopening the country’s borders for the first time since early 2020, when Beijing first acknowledged the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Beijing says it has adjusted Covid policies because the current strains of Omicron driving infections are less deadly than earlier on in the pandemic, and insisted they have prevented the high number of deaths seen in many Western countries. Health officials say they continue to monitor the spread of the virus and that they haven’t detected new variants so far.
Even so, these changes have stirred concern in some other countries, including the U.S., where officials worry that Chinese travelers could spread more-virulent Covid variants that may emerge from continuing outbreaks in China.
The new U.S. measures, which start Jan. 5, require all air travelers aged 2 and over who originally departed from China or the semiautonomous territories of Hong Kong and Macau to show airlines a negative result from a Covid test taken no longer than two days before starting their trip. Travelers can also show documents proving they have recovered from an infection, if they tested positive more than 10 days before their flight.
American officials say the requirement is meant to slow the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. amid surging infections in China, pointing to how the Chinese government has reduced Covid testing and case reporting while sharing minimal data that can help identify new Covid variants.
Some medical experts, however, say the new Covid screening measures are more performative than useful, noting that Omicron has long spread across the globe—including in the U.S., where Omicron subvariants have been driving infection waves in recent weeks.
Early in the pandemic, the Trump administration barred foreign nationals who had recently visited China from entering the U.S. and implemented quarantines for Americans who had traveled to parts of China where the initial outbreak was detected.
Beijing initially denounced such measures as discriminatory against China, but also started imposing visa, health-screening and quarantine measures that curtailed travel in and out of the country—so as to keep out the virus after Chinese authorities contained the contagion within the country’s borders.
“Travel restrictions can buy some time at the beginning of a pandemic to ramp up testing and build hospital capacity,” tweeted Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “But when the virus is everywhere (as it is now) they don’t offer any benefit.”
Chinese officials and state media have also pushed back against foreign criticism of Beijing’s zero-Covid reversal, saying Western media are trying to discredit China’s battle against the pandemic. “This type of rhetoric is driven by bias, intended to smear China and politically motivated,” Mr. Wang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Wednesday.
Japan said that starting Friday it will require travelers from mainland China to test negative for Covid-19 upon arrival, with those who test positive facing quarantine at designated facilities. India, Italy, Israel and South Korea have also imposed testing requirements on travelers from China. The island democracy of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory, has said that from Jan. 1 it will require people traveling from the Chinese mainland to undergo Covid tests on arrival.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November as part of efforts to thaw chilled ties with Beijing, said his government didn’t currently plan to revise rules related to travelers from China, but would continue monitoring the situation.
“Covid is still around, it’s around here in Australia, but of course, there are new variants around the world as well,” he said in a Thursday interview with local television.
Italy’s decision to test all visitors arriving from China followed reports that around half of the passengers on two flights to Milan had been infected.
“The measure is essential to ensure the surveillance and identification of any variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population,” Health Minister Orazio Schillaci said. In early 2020, Italy became the first country in Europe to face a serious Covid outbreak, which quickly overwhelmed the health system, brought the country to a standstill and caused tens of thousands of deaths.