COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire in China. Worried about the emergence of a new variant, several countries, including Canada and the United States, now require a screening test for Chinese travelers. Beijing castigates this decision and threatens to apply retaliatory measures against these nations which play caution.
Nearly 20% of the world’s population has been newly exposed to the coronavirus since China suddenly lifted all its health restrictions in December. In the same breath, Beijing paved the way for Chinese residents to travel internationally.
Several countries are reluctant to welcome this deluge of Chinese nationals confined for 3 years, anticipating the arrival of new variants and a new wave of consequent contamination.
Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Australia and several European countries have announced stricter measures for Chinese travelers.
Like its international partners, Canada will require a negative screening test from Thursday for all travelers on flights from China, Macau or Hong Kong.
The Chinese government is fuming over these restrictions. “We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and that some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Tuesday. of a daily press briefing. “We strongly oppose attempts to manipulate health measures for political purposes and will take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity. »
Washington’s requirement to present a negative test at the country’s borders for travelers from China “is based solely on science”, retorted American diplomacy spokesman Ned Price on Tuesday. Moreover, the “overwhelming majority” of European Union countries voted on Tuesday in favor of systematic tests for Chinese travelers, announced a spokesperson for the European Commission.
Haro on variants
Representatives of the World Health Organization (WHO) met with Chinese officials last Friday to call on them to carry out regular data sharing on COVID-19. Mao told reporters on Tuesday that the two sides would continue “technical exchanges” to help “end the pandemic as quickly as possible.”
The concern has spread to UN offices in Geneva, where a committee of experts met on Tuesday to work on an international response, as the Chinese data have raised eyebrows.
Beijing, after admitting that quantifying contagions on its territory has become “impossible”, stopped sharing daily case and death figures on December 25. From now on, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention will only publish this information once a month.
The authorities have also changed the criteria for assigning a death due to COVID-19. Only 15 such deaths have therefore been reported in the country of 1.4 billion people since restrictions were lifted on December 7.
The variants circulating in China compare to those circulating elsewhere, according to the international medical data-sharing coalition GISAID. “Preliminary phylogenetic analyses” indicate that the variants detected in China resemble those detected around the world between July and December 2022. This GISAID report was published on January 3.
However, there is little data to support these conclusions. In the last 180 days, China has shared only 1137 virus sequence analyzes with GISAID, or 0.02% of the cases identified. By comparison, the United States provided the independent body with some 559,000 variant analyses, or 4.5% of the recorded cases. Canada fares even better in terms of transparency, having offered 78,340 tests, representing almost 15% of official cases.
More than 100 ambulances per day
Local accounts confirm that China is currently facing its worst outbreak. In the megalopolis of Shanghai in particular, two thirds of the inhabitants could have been infected in recent weeks, estimated Tuesday a senior official of one of the main hospitals in the city. “Currently, the epidemic in Shanghai is very widespread and it may have affected 70% of the population,” Chen Erzhen, vice president of Ruijin Hospital, told a blog affiliated with the People’s Daily.
In other major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Tianjin (North), Chongqing (South-West) and Canton (South), health authorities believe that the peak has already passed.
Dr. Chen, also a member of Shanghai’s COVID-19 expert council, said his hospital receives 1,600 emergency admissions a day — double the period before the restrictions were lifted — 80 percent concerning patients with COVID-19. “More than 100 ambulances arrive at the hospital every day,” he said.
Well established in the cities, the disease will recover irremediably in the four corners of the Middle Kingdom by the end of the month. January 22 will be the Chinese New Year, and tens of millions of Chinese will cross the country between now and then to join their native countryside and celebrate. This mass migration canceled for three years due to the pandemic thus risks spreading the virus even in remote areas of China.
With Associated Press and Agence France-Presse