CHICAGO/NEW YORK – With COVID-19 infections in China, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U. S. government plans to take wastewater samples from foreign aircraft to track new emerging variants, the firm told Reuters.
Such a policy would offer a better solution to track the virus and slow down your access to the US. The U. S. government said the new restrictions announced this week in the U. S. The U. S. and other countries, which require mandatory negative COVID testing for China’s ers, 3 infectious disease experts said. . Reuters.
Travel restrictions, such as mandatory testing, have so far failed to particularly slow the spread of COVID-19 and largely serve as optics, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.
“They seem essential from a political point of view. I think each and every government feels like they will be accused of not doing enough for their citizens if they don’t,” he said.
The United States also this week expanded its voluntary genome sequencing program at airports, adding Seattle and Los Angeles to the program. This brings to seven the total number of airports collecting test data.
But experts said it doesn’t provide a significant pattern size.
A better solution would be to check airline wastewater, which would give a clearer picture of how the virus mutates, given the lack of knowledge transparency in China, said Dr. Eric Topol, a genomics expert and director of the Scripps Translational Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Removing sewage from China’s planes “would be a very smart tactic,” Topol said, adding that it is vital for the United States for its surveillance tactics “because China is not willing to share its genomic data. “
China said the complaint about its COVID-19 statistics was baseless and downplayed the threat of new variants, saying it expects the mutations to be more infectious but less severe. Japan, to impose new testing regulations on Chinese visitors as Beijing lifted travel controls. The analysis of aircraft wastewater is one of the features that is thought through the CDC to stop the arrival of new variants in the US. CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said in an email. The company is grappling with China’s lack of transparency about COVID after the country of 1. 4 billion people lifted strict COVID-19 lockdown and testing policies, releasing the virus into a previously unvaccinated and unexposed population.
“Previous COVID-19 wastewater tracking has proven to be a valuable tool and aircraft wastewater tracking can potentially be an option,” he wrote. not countries of the spread of new variants. They discovered the Omicron variant in the sewage of two advertising planes that flew from Ethiopia to France in December 2021, though passengers had to take COVID tests before boarding. California researchers reported in July that a network wastewater pattern in San Diego detected the presence of the Alpha, Delta, Epsilon and Omicron variants up to 14 days before they began appearing on nasal swabs.
Osterholm and others said mandatory testing before traveling to the U. S. is unlikely to be mandatory to be able to do so. U. S. Citizens prevent new variants from entering the country.
“Border closures or border testing make very little difference. Maybe it will delay it for a few days,” he said, as the virus is very likely to spread around the world and may infect other people in Europe or elsewhere who may at that time. bring it to the United States.
David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it’s vital to develop genomic surveillance and that wastewater sampling can be useful, but testing takes time.
“I think we need to be careful about the extent to which we hope this knowledge can indicate our ability to respond,” he said Rappler. com.