BEIJING, CHINA — The United States is the latest of several developing countries to impose restrictions on visitors to China after Beijing removed a major barrier to overseas travel despite emerging COVID cases in the country.
Hospitals across China have been hit by an explosion of COVID cases following Beijing’s resolve to lift strict regulations that had largely kept the virus at bay, but have caused its economy to collapse and sparked protests.
On Monday, the country said it would end the mandatory quarantine upon arrival, prompting many jubilant Chinese citizens to travel abroad.
In response, the U. S. The U. S. and several countries announced they would require negative COVID tests for all travelers from mainland China.
“The recent immediate increase in COVID-19 transmission in China increases the possibility of new variants emerging,” a senior U. S. fitness official told reporters. He is interviewed by the U. S. on a conference call.
Beijing has provided limited knowledge about variants circulating in China to global knowledge bases, the official said, and its testing and reporting of new instances have also declined.
The EE. UU. se resolution came after Italy, Japan, India and Malaysia announced their own measures in a bid to oppose the loading of new COVID variants from China.
Beijing has denounced “hype, vilification and political manipulation” through Western media in relation to its COVID response.
“Currently, the epidemic scenario in China is predictable and controlled,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a news briefing on Wednesday.
However, China still allows foreign visitors, and the issuance of visas for foreign tourists and academics is still suspended.
But the lifting of mandatory quarantines has sparked renewed interest abroad through Chinese citizens, who have largely been confined to their countries since Beijing demolished the drawbridge in March 2020.
Italy said Wednesday it would make the coronavirus mandatory for all visitors from China.
The measure is “essential to ensure surveillance and identification of any variant of the virus in order to protect the Italian population,” Health Minister Orazio Schillaci said.
The French president also said he had “called for adequate measures to protect” its citizens, with Paris noting that it is closely following “developments in China. “
The European Commission will meet on Thursday to discuss “possible measures for a coordinated approach” across EU states to the rise in COVID cases in China.
On the front lines of China’s COVID wave, hospitals are battling the surge in cases that have hit the elderly the hardest.
In Tianjin, about 140 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of the capital, Beijing, AFP visited two hospital wards hit by patients with the virus.
Doctors are asked to perform jobs even if they are infected, one said.
AFP saw more than two dozen patients, mostly elderly, liars on stretchers in public emergency room spaces, and at least one dead user ejected from a ward.
“It’s a four-hour wait to see a doctor,” an elderly man who said he had COVID can be heard saying.
“There are another three hundred people in front of you. “
China’s National Health Commission (NHC) announced last week that it would no longer release the official number of COVID deaths.
But with the end of mass testing, and China’s resolve to reclassify COVID deaths in a move that analysts said would drastically downplay deaths, those numbers no longer reflected reality.
— AFP
© 2006 – 2021 The citizen