Italy wants EU to test Chinese arrivals for Covid

Italy urged the rest of the EU on Thursday to follow its lead and test travellers from China for Covid, but others said they saw no need to do so now or were waiting for a common EU stance.

EU health officials could not agree on a single course of action at talks in the morning, and said they will keep talking.

EU countries have split on Covid before. When the pandemic began there was much debate on what to do, and heated competition to buy safety equipment, before member states pulled together and placed and shared joint vaccine orders.

Italy “expects and hopes” that the EU will impose mandatory Covid tests for all passengers arriving from China as Rome did, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told reporters.

Doubts over data on the scale of China’s Covid infections  prompted countries including the US and Japan to impose new travel rules on Chinese visitors as Beijing lifted its restrictions.

In the EU, only Italy has ordered Covid-19 antigen swabs for all travellers from China. This could be ineffective if others in the bloc, where people travel freely from country to country, will not do the same, said Meloni.

The main airport in the Italian city of Milan began testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai on December 26 and found that almost half of them were infected.

Covid tests?

But earlier on Thursday, Brigitte Autran, head of French health risk-assessment committee Covars, said: “From a scientific point of view, there is no reason at this stage to bring back controls at the borders.”

Autran, who advises the government on epidemiological risks, told Radio Classique that for now the situation was under control, and that there were no signs of worrying new Covid variants in China.

Germany and Portugal have said they saw no need for new travel restrictions, while Austria stressed the economic benefits of Chinese tourists’ return to Europe.

Norway, which is not an EU member but is part of the bloc’s border-free deal, was taking a similar approach.

“We probably have several hundred thousand people getting Covid in Norway every week now,” professor Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health wrote on Twitter. A few hundred extra cases among travellers from China would be a drop in the ocean.”

Elsewhere in Europe, Britain has said it does not plan to bring back Covid testing for people entering the country.

The EU health committee — officials of health ministries about the bloc and chaired by the European Commission — ended its meeting calling for a united stance.

“We need to act jointly & will continue our discussions, the European Commission said in a tweet, but did not say when talks would resume.

Chinas borders have been shut to foreigners since early 2020, soon after the coronavirus emerged in its central city of Wuhan, but it has announced it will do away with a quarantine for inbound travellers from January 8.

The re-opening raises the prospect of Chinese tourists returning to shopping streets about the world, once a market worth $255bn  a year globally.

Reuters