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A government spokeswoman said Beijing would take reciprocal measures opposed to countries that have tried to limit travelers from China.
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By Alexandra Stevenson
The Chinese government on Tuesday denounced Covid needs imposed through other countries on travelers from China as unscientific or “excessive” and threatened to take countermeasures.
As China prepares to open its borders later this week, allowing its citizens to travel abroad for the first time since the pandemic began, countries including Canada, the United States, France, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom have made the decision to limit the arrival of people. of the country
Countries have raised concerns about the accumulation of COVID-19 infections in China, the potential threat of variants arising from its outbreak, and the government’s perceived reluctance to share information about the coronavirus with other countries. The restrictions come with the requirement of a negative covid test or mandatory check-in-arrival.
In response, Chinese officials have accused countries of introducing restrictions for political reasons, imposing needs on Chinese travelers that do apply to others.
“Some countries have no clinical basis for limiting access from China, and some exaggerated practices are even more unacceptable,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
“We firmly oppose the practice of manipulating covid prevention and measures to achieve political goals, and we will take corresponding measures in accordance with the precept of reciprocity in other situations,” Mao said, without elaborating.
Even after China eases its restrictions, the government will still require incoming passengers to provide a negative polymerase chain reaction test, or PCR, result within 48 hours prior to departure.
However, many fitness experts have said the restrictions won’t save the new variants, just as previous overseas bans have done very little to prevent the spread of the Omicron variant.
China is facing a wave of covid cases after the government abandoned a pandemic “zero covid” strategy that helped keep the virus at bay within its borders for nearly three years. In December, the government dismantled an expanding screening device that required citizens to check themselves regularly and abandoned its grueling lockdown and quarantine strategy that was implemented not only for those who tested positive, but also for their contacts.
This Sunday, for the first time since early 2020, some time after the Covid-19 outbreak in China, the government will remove quarantine regulations for foreign visitors to China and ease restrictions on incoming flights.
It also restarted processing Chinese citizens’ passport programs for overseas excursions. One-way flight bookings jumped nearly 300% on Dec. 27 when the government announced changes to its border restrictions, as many other people began making travel plans to see family and friends. travel only, to the knowledge of Trip. com Group, an excursion operator. Reservation company.
Many countries that have long relied on Chinese tourists before the pandemic are now struggling to balance the economic outlook of an influx of Chinese tourism with health problems similar to the outbreak in China.
An organization of officials from European Union countries, known as the Health Security Committee, which has been a key source of recommendations for the bloc’s covid-era policies, advised on Tuesday that it would be reasonable to test passengers from China for covid before boarding flights to Europe. . said a very sensible EU official on Twitter.
The European Union is expected to offer its 27 member states, many of which are popular destinations for Chinese tourists, non-binding recommendations on how to board travelers from China on Wednesday.
But EU nations can’t set their own rules, and Stella Kyriakides, the EU’s fitness commissioner, made an implicit call on Twitter for EU nations not to adopt contradictory policies that could damage public fitness and create logistical chaos for travelers. of China.
“Unity remains our toughest tool against covid,” he wrote.
But some European countries have placed restrictions on visitors from China without waiting for EU advice.
Italy’s Lombardy region, which includes Milan, began screening travelers from China last week, a policy that was temporarily followed throughout Italy.
More than a portion of the 120 passengers who arrived in Italy on a flight from Wenzhou, China, on Dec. 26 tested positive for the virus in PCR tests. On the flight that landed Dec. 29 from Tianjin, China, nearly a portion, 26 of 56 passengers, tested positive.
The U. S. Public Fitness AgencyThe U. S. Department of Health, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said Tuesday that reported infections in China dropped from a record high on Dec. 2, “likely also due to fewer tests being conducted, resulting in fewer infections detected. “.
“There is still a lack of reliable knowledge about covid-19 cases, hospital admissions, deaths, and intensive care unit (ICU) capacity and occupancy in China,” the E. C. D. C. said. dijo. me said.
But the firm noted that so far no new variants have been recorded in China, and that EU citizens had the highest degrees of immunity and vaccination as opposed to known variants in circulation, meaning the rise in infections in China “is not a challenge to the immune response. “” of other people in Europe.
China has stopped reporting daily cases, and many scientists have raised considerations about the opacity of its reports of severe cases and Covid-like deaths. , more harmful variants. There is still no indication of this, and many scientists are skeptical that such a situation will occur in the coming weeks.
Officially, China reported only 4,804 local cases and 3 deaths on Monday in its most recent release, but several cities have reported estimates of part of a million or more daily cases. Zhejiang fitness officials said the coastal province records one million cases every day, adding that they expect the outbreak to peak there by the end of this month.
“With the foreign policy adjustment, the threat of new imported strains and the threat of domestic transmission will also particularly increase,” Zhejiang’s Provincial Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an advisory issued Tuesday.
Chinese state-controlled media have accused US and European countries of applying a “double standard” to China and the restrictions as a “political card”.
“It turns out that, according to the political logic of some other people in Europe and the United States, it doesn’t matter if China ‘opens up’ or ‘doesn’t open,’ what it does is wrong,” one comment reads. of China’s state-owned broadcaster, CCTV.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Emma Bubola contributed to the report. Zixu Wang contributed to the research.
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