Italy has become the first country in Europe to make it obligatory for people arriving from China to be tested for Covid-19 following Beijing moving to reopen its borders after lifting some of its toughest anti-Covid restrictions.
Italy has already been monitoring swab tests at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and Milan’s Malpensa airport, where on Monday one in two passengers arriving on flights from China who undertook non-mandatory tests were found to be positive for coronavirus.
The WHO director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called on China to share data and conduct relevant studies to help the world understand which Covid variants are circulating. Dwyer said data was crucial because in countries where Covid-19 is out of control, the sheer number of people infected makes it more likely that there will be a rare event that leads to changes in the virus, potentially creating a new variant of concern.
Prolonged lockdowns in China also mean a significant proportion of the population have not been infected with newer variants, and the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines China has relied on appear less effective than mRNA vaccines used elsewhere.
“That is the environment where you’d expect new variants to appear,” Dwyer said. “So therefore monitoring people returning from China who are sick is going to be important. We don’t know … whether those variants [in China] are any different to what we’ve seen elsewhere.”
China’s decision to resume issuing passports for the first time in almost three years could allow large numbers of Chinese tourists to travel abroad for next month’s lunar new year holiday. Travel services companies Trip.com and Qunar said international ticket bookings and searches for visa information on their websites rose five to eight times after Tuesday’s announcement, with top destinations including Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States, Britain and Australia.
