As COVID-19 infections in China, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not allowed to do so. The U. S. government plans to model wastewater from foreign aircraft to track any new emerging variants, the firm told Reuters.
Such a policy would offer a better solution to track the virus and delay its 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 tests 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 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.
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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 clever tactic,” Topol said, adding that it was vital for the United States in its surveillance tactics “because China is very reluctant to share its genomic data. “
China said the complaint about its covid statistics was baseless and downplayed the threat of new variants, saying it expects the mutations to be more infectious but less severe. to impose new testing regulations on Chinese visitors when Beijing lifted controls.
The analysis of aircraft wastewater is one of the characteristics of 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 a lack of transparency about covid in China after the country of 1. 4 billion people lifted strict covid lockdown and testing policies, releasing the virus to a population that was unvaccinated and had not been exposed.
“Previous Covid-19 wastewater tracking has proven to be a valuable tool and aircraft wastewater tracking can potentially be an option,” he wrote.
French researchers reported in July that aircraft wastewater tests showed that the need for negative covid tests before foreign flights does not affect countries from 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, even though passengers had to take Covid tests before boarding.
California researchers reported in July that wastewater sampling from the network in San Diego detected the presence of 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 slow it down for a few days,” he said, as the virus is very likely to spread around the world and can infect other people in Europe or elsewhere that 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.
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