When Milan started testing arrivals from China for COVID amid the country’s explosive virus spread, it found that about half of the travelers on two flights had the virus.
That prompted Italy, the first European country to be hit hard by the pandemic in 2020, to impose mandatory COVID testing on all passengers from China and sequence the Milan tests to screen for possible new variants.
But Italy hit a wall when it tried to pressure the European Union (EU) to follow its approach.
The 27-member bloc couldn’t agree on a course of action when it held talks on Thursday morning, but promised to continue discussions for a common action.
“From a scientific point of view, there is no reason at this stage to bring back controls at the borders,” said Brigitte Autran, head of the French health risk assessment committee COVARS.
That view was shared by other nations such as Germany, Portugal, and the UK, with Austria stressing the economic gains from the impending return of Chinese tourists, who from Jan. 8 will be allowed to travel overseas after almost three years of being confined within the country’s borders.
“We likely have several hundred thousand people getting COVID in Norway every week now,” Professor Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health wrote on Twitter. “A few hundred extra cases among travelers from China would be a drop in the ocean.”
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in a press conference urged other fellow EU members to take action.
The mandatory COVID testing “is only effective if it is taken at the European level,” Meloni said, noting that many China-origin visitors arrive in Italy on connecting flights through other European countries.
Transparency Lacking
Doubts over the official data from China and the scale of the outbreak have propelled its neighbors, including Japan, India, South Korea, and Taiwan to adopt COVID testing requirements for travelers from the country, an action that the United States followed on Wednesday.
“There are mounting concerns in the international community on the ongoing COVID-19 surges in China and the lack of transparent data, including viral genomic sequence data, being reported from the PRC,” an unnamed U.S. official said in a written media statement earlier in the week, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Without such data, the official added, “it is becoming increasingly difficult for public health officials to ensure that they will be able to identify any potential new variants and take prompt measures to reduce the spread.”
Facing international criticism, China’s health officials on Thursday continued to insist that the regime has been transparent and following the international standard on reporting COVID deaths, even though the negligible official death toll of 11 flies in the face of mounting accounts by funeral home workers and healthcare staff of high fatality numbers across the country.
China’s top health body estimated that almost 250 million residents had contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December, according to a memo leaked online.
‘A Huge Gamble’
The problem with the EU system, said virologist Sean Lin, former lab director at the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, is that the transnational body can’t make quick decisions even when urgent action is necessary.
Over the weekend, China announced it was opening its borders from Jan. 8 and is encouraging a rebound in tourism after suspending travel for much of the past three years. After all this time living under the strict zero-COVID policy, he said, many Chinese people would “rush out using this limited time window” as the policy may change at any time with this evolving situation.
“You will face a huge influx of Chinese population in a short period of time,” Lin told The Epoch Times.
Screening arrivals from China for COVID infections should be the bare minimum policy adopted by countries around the world, according to Lin.
Germany’s Health Ministry spokesperson Sebastian Guelde said they are monitoring the situation but have seen “no indication that a more dangerous variant has developed in this outbreak in China.” Lin described this statement as “plain stupid.”
“It’s a huge gamble,” he said. “You are still trusting the Communist Party in this kind of situation.”
“The Chinese government is playing word games with the whole world, and the zero COVID policy that in the last two or three years is against science itself.”
He pointed to the severe pulmonary symptoms that emerged in China’s COVID wave that hasn’t appeared elsewhere, which he said indicates the virus in circulation may not be the regular Omicron virus that the Chinese officials have claimed.
Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, on Thursday said officials have sequenced half of the samples from the visitors from China tested, and all showed the Omicron strain.
“This is quite reassuring,” she said at a press conference Thursday. “The situation in Italy is under control, and there are no immediate concerns.”
But Lin is far from optimistic.
With the Chinese border reopened, the situation now is similar to early 2020, when Beijing locked down the virus epicenter Wuhan but allowed people to travel freely to the rest of the world, bringing the virus with them.
The border reopening amounts to letting the virus, which could have mutated, freely transmit worldwide, which Lin described as imposing “a disaster to the whole world.”
“I think this may be even worse than 2020.”
Eva Fu is a New York-based writer for The Epoch Times focusing on U.S. politics, U.S.-China relations, religious freedom, and human rights. Contact Eva at eva.fu@epochtimes.com
