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Amid concerns about a coronavirus outbreak in Beijing, Biden’s management announced the replacement policy for those entering the U. S. It is in the U. S. from China, adding Hong Kong and Macau.
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By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller
The Biden administration, fearing that a wave of coronavirus infections in Beijing could spawn a new, more harmful variant, announced Wednesday that it would require travelers from China, adding Hong Kong and Macau, to provide negative Covid-19 tests before entering the United States. States. States.
The requirement will take effect Jan. 5, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which made the announcement. Agency officials say they are very concerned about China’s lack of transparency regarding its outbreak and, in particular, its inability to trace and variants and subvariants of series circulating within its borders.
CDC officials said the verification requirement will apply to air passengers, regardless of nationality and vaccination status. It will also apply to travelers from China entering the U. S. They are connected through the U. S. through a third country or connect through the U. S. The U. S. has already imposed restrictions, and India imposed negative Covid-19 verification reports and random checks at airports for passengers from China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand.
But as they did when President Donald J. Trump imposed pandemic restrictions, some experts have questioned whether the testing requirement would help, especially given the surge in cases in some parts of the United States. , scientists say the spread of the virus is fueled through a subvariant of Omicron, XBB, which appears to spread faster than those connected to the dominant variant in Beijing.
“I understand politically why this wants to be done, but at the end of the day, it’s a false sense of security that we’re slowing down transmission,” Michael T said. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. at the University of Minnesota.
But President Biden’s coronavirus reaction coordinator, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, questioned the comparison to Mr. Trump who had limited access for foreigners from China at the beginning of the pandemic.
The Biden administration’s policy “is not a travel ban at all,” Dr. Jha said in an email after the article was published online. Rather, he called it a “conservative” testing requirement for all travelers from China, not just citizens of that country. country, which is mandatory “because China, unlike virtually each and every other major country, does not update the global database of Covid variants and Covid cases.
The covid outbreak in China has worsened in recent days, with local governments reporting thousands of infections during the day. Videos received through The New York Times show patients with health problems crammed into hospital hallways. But the scenario is complicated to understand. Monitor in real time as China does not publish reliable Covid data.
The C. D. C. also announced Wednesday that it is expanding a voluntary genomic tracking program that looks for new variants in unnamed swabs taken from foreign travelers at major U. S. airports. UU to come with Los Angeles and Seattle.
Biden’s management has presented vaccines and other covid-19s to China, but that aid has been rejected, federal officials said. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken also spoke with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi shortly before Christmas and “emphasized the importance of transparency to the foreign community,” the State Department said.
Some experts feared that by encouraging China’s transparency, the new policy would make the Chinese even less open.
“The most important strategy right now is that we want our political and diplomatic communication with China,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University. He said he was involved that the Biden administration’s new policy would paint “the other way. “
But Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health, said management had no choice.
“I think they are rightly seeking to pressure China to shoulder its responsibilities abroad,” he said, adding that the “understanding pact” urging countries to share knowledge about a pandemic “will work if countries report bad behavior. “
After 3 years of insisting on a “zero covid” policy, China made an abrupt U-turn in early December and lifted that policy, following mass protests against blockades threatening the ruling Communist Party. Since then, there has been dramatic construction in the number of instances in Beijing.
One of the main fears of public health officials is that the Chinese population has little herbal immunity, allowing the virus to spread quickly. The immediate spread, in turn, creates new opportunities for the virus to evolve, posing a threat that new variants may emerge and spread to other parts of the world.
Scientists say this doesn’t necessarily mean a more harmful variant will soon emerge in China. Over the past year, other people in the U. S. have been able to do so. UU. se have become inflamed with waves of Omicron subvariants. The virus, scientists said any of them could take off there.
“In a sense, anything that took off first will be dominant there,” said James Wood, an infectious disease expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
Some variants beyond are thought to have arisen when the virus mutated widespread infections in other people with weakened immune systems, suggesting that the amount of transmission in a given location alone would not determine the possibility of new variants appearing.
“While there is an argument that there are more people infected, there would possibly be more opportunities for mutation and progression of a new variant,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University, “we don’t yet know whether the new variants will primarily expand the passage from person to person or into other people who enjoy widespread infections.
Scientists in Hong Kong reported that an Omicron subvariant known as BF. 7 is to blame for the Beijing outbreak. This variant is a sublineage of BA. 5, which until recently was dominant in the United States. But BF. 7, provided in the U. S. for months, has shown no signs of superiority over other versions of Omicron in the country.
The C. D. C. estimated that BF. 7 accounted for 4% of cases at the end of December and had become less common since November. the United States.
In the United States, the C. D. C. estimated last week that XBB subvariant has more to account for nearly one-fifth of cases in the country, up from just 3 percent of cases the previous month.
XBB is spreading rapidly in the northeastern United States, scientists said, and accounts for more than a portion of new infections there. And it appears to have merit over the BQ. 1 Omicron subvariants that have recently been dominant in the United States, the scientists said. .
Scientists are in the early stages of reading the XBB subvariant. They said an even newer edition of this subvariant, known as XBB. 1. 5, had emerged. Preliminary studies have suggested that the new edition is to evade existing immune responses and bind to human cells.
Especially in a few months, once other people in China have a degree of immunity to past infections and the virus is under more pressure to evolve there, it will be to look for new variants, the scientists said.
“It would be great if China provided some sort of summary of the variants they were seeing,” said Dr Wood, from the University of New South Wales. “Otherwise, in the end, it’s detected in genomic surveillance in Europe or the United States or anywhere else other people travel. “
Still, he said, for now, China poses an outsized threat of generating a new variant.
“We’ve had a number of infections internationally,” he said. “That’s a lot more infections than happened in China alone. “
Emily Anthes and Karan Deep Singh contributed to this report.
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