Ministers are to review whether travellers from China should face Covid restrictions amid growing concern at the risk from passengers bringing in the virus.

Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, said: “The Govt has said it is now going to keep that under review and review whether different countries with Covid outbreaks etc should face different restrictions.”

It marked a shift from the Government’s position just hours earlier when a spokesman said it had “no plans” to impose restrictions, despite countries including the US, Italy, Japan, India and Taiwan introducing pre or post-arrival tests on passengers from China.

There is growing concern that China’s decision to drop quarantine for overseas visitors from January 8 while resuming issuing visas to foreigners and passports to its own people may affect the global spread of the disease.

Surging case numbers

The end of China’s zero-Covid approach comes amid surging case numbers said to be in the millions, with low vaccination rates, especially among elderly people.

The European Commission’s health security committee is due to convene on Thursday to discuss “possible measures for a coordinated EU approach” to China’s Covid surge.

The Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, in her end-of-year speech on Thursday, called for a decision on whether the rest of the EU should impose mandatory testing on arrivals from China to be “swiftly taken”.

She told a news conference that Rome “expects and hopes” that the EU will impose mandatory tests for all passengers flying in from China, just as Italy did on Wednesday.

Half of Chinese visitors test positive

It followed the disclosure that up to half the Chinese visitors arriving in Italy by plane have tested positive for Covid.

Experts at the Spallanzani Institute, Italy’s leading infectious diseases hospital, said the measures implemented by Italian authorities should be replicated across the rest of Europe.

They were backed by former health minister Lord Bethell, who said the UK Government should follow Italy in introducing post-arrival screening tests on travellers from China to check for potential new variants and identify who had the virus.

“What the Italians are doing is post-flight surveillance on arrivals in Italy in order to understand whether there are any emerging variants and to understand the impact of the virus on the Italian health system. That’s a sensible thing to do and something the UK Government should be seriously looking at,” he told BBC Radio Four.

Lord Bethell said mandatory post-arrival tests would allow the UK to conduct the necessary genomic checks to “understand whether there are any new variants and whether this virus is going to break to become more dangerous, particularly to the vaccinated population”.

“A lot of these people who get on these flights are people who are poorly themselves and are coming to the West for medical help. That’s quite a daunting prospect for our health system. It is important we know which of them have the virus and what virus they have got,” he said.

NHS has ‘enough on its plate’

“Now, let’s just say that lots and lots of Chinese nationals want to come and visit this country with a poor vaccine, they end up getting sick. And then the NHS has frankly got enough on its plate right now without any emergency admissions, which it would of course have to deal with,” the chair of the health select committee told Times Radio.

The MP for Winchester added that it was likely the Government would change its position on the protocol “over the course of the afternoon”.

He said: “I’m surprised that the initial line that they put out was this. I don’t think it’s gone down well with many members of the public or constituents this morning. Given what’s happened, I think we have every right to over not underreact.

“So I suspect that there are robust conversations going on within government and the UK Health Security Agency, as we speak. I will be surprised if the government line is the same at teatime as it is at lunchtime.

“Public confidence is such that we know the lesson of two years ago was that time is of the essence … the public are a bit bemused that we are in this place, seemingly not having learned.”

US demands negative tests

The United States announced on Wednesday that all travellers from China must test negative for Covid before entering the country. The move will come into effect from January 5 for all air passengers over two years old who will, from then on, require a negative result from a test no more than two days before departure from China, Hong Kong or Macao.

India has adopted the same stance as the US by insisting on pre-arrival tests for travellers from China, while Japan, Taiwan and Italy are requiring testing of inbound passengers from China on arrival.

Officials from the Department for Transport, Home Office and Department for Health and Social Care are expected to assess on Thursday whether the UK should review its current stance with six non-stop flights from China with 1,795 seats, due to arrive in the next seven days. There are 26 direct flights due in January.

‘Inevitable’ UK will take action

Paul Charles, chief executive of the travel consultancy The PC Agency, said it was “inevitable” the UK Government would take action after facing criticism for its slow response to the spread of Covid from China on flights at the start of the pandemic.

“Governments have learned lessons from the initial wave of Covid. One of those lessons is that they work more closely on such restrictions. You cannot have Italy and the US doing one thing and others not doing the same,” said Mr Charles.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, was particularly critical of the UK’s failure to act over the initial Covid outbreaks when international travel was allowed to continue into the UK and was on Thursday night consulting advisers on whether to demand restrictions.

Virologists are watching nervously how China’s decision to drop quarantine for overseas visitors from 8 January and from the same date resume issuing visas to foreigners and passports to its own people may affect the global spread of the disease.

End of ‘zero Covid’ in China

The end of China’s zero-Covid approach comes amid surging case numbers, with low vaccination rates especially among elderly people.

“The recent rapid increase in Covid transmission in China increases the potential for new variants emerging,” a senior US health official told reporters in a phone briefing.

“We have just limited information in terms of what’s being shared related to the number of cases that are increasing, hospitalisations and especially deaths. Also, there’s been a decrease in testing across China so it also makes it difficult to know what the true infection rate is,” the health official said.

Beijing only announced on Monday its decision to end quarantine for arrivals – effectively reopening travel in and out of the country for the first time since March 2020. Until this week, anyone entering China had to undergo quarantine in state facilities.

Testing essential, says Italy

Before the pandemic, China had been the world’s largest outbound tourism market. But it is unclear how many Chinese people will travel abroad after 8 January given that the number of flights are limited, and many citizens need to renew their passports.

Italy’s decision to impose testing for all China arrivals comes almost three years after it became the first western country to be hit by the pandemic, which to date has claimed more than 180,000 lives in the country.

“The measure is essential to guarantee the surveillance and identification of any variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population,” said Orazio Schillaci, the Italian health minister.

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.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk