The European Union should consider immediately scaling up genomic sequencing of COVID-19 infections and monitoring of waste water, including from airports, to detect any new variants given the virus surge in China, the bloc’s health chief said.
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As COVID-19 infections surge in China, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new variants, the agency told Reuters.
After China scrapped three years of zero-COVID curbs in 30 days, setting off a massive wave of infections, Beijing’s policymakers face an immense challenge to treat the sick and minimize deaths while winning back public trust dented by previous policies.
Around 9,000 people in China are probably dying each day from COVID-19, UK-based health data firm Airfinity said on Thursday, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago, as infections ripped across the world’s most populous nation.
Italy on Thursday urged the rest of the European Union to follow its lead and test travelers from China for COVID, but others said they saw no need to do so for now or were waiting for a common stance across the largely border-less bloc.
Chinese hospitals and funeral homes were under intense pressure on Wednesday as a surging COVID-19 wave drained resources, while the scale of the outbreak and doubts over official data prompted some countries to consider new travel rules on Chinese visitors.
The U.S. government may impose new COVID-19 measures on travelers to the United States from China over concerns about the “lack of transparent data” coming from Beijing, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
China will stop requiring inbound travelers to go into quarantine starting from Jan. 8, the National Health Commission said on Monday in a major step towards easing curbs on its borders, which have been largely shut since 2020.
In more than three decades of emergency medicine, Beijing-based doctor Howard Bernstein said, he has never seen anything like this.
Mask-wearing Beijing and Shanghai commuters crowded subway trains on Monday as China’s two biggest cities edged closer to living with COVID-19 even as frontline medical workers scrambled to cope with millions of new infections.