Chinese travelers face biased treatment
Negative coronavirus test requirement by US and other countries raises questions for fairness
The requirement of a negative coronavirus test by the United States and other countries for travelers from China has prompted questions about the policies’ fairness.
The US started imposing mandatory COVID-19 tests on travelers from China beginning on Jan 5. All air passengers aged 2 and older will need a negative result from a test no more than two days before departure from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong or Macao, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
US neighbor Canada followed suit, announcing similar measures.
“The most important strategy right now is we need to improve our political and diplomatic communication with China,” Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University, told The New York Times. He said he feared that the policy of President Joe Biden’s administration would work “in the opposite direction”.
On social media, some questioned the fairness of the requirements being placed only on China.
“This policy would only make sense if they make EVERYONE traveling into the US show negative COVID tests, otherwise this is just racism plain and simple,” wrote Frankie Huang on Twitter on Dec 28.
James Wood, an infectious disease expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said China does not pose a large risk of a new variant.
“We’ve had a huge number of infections internationally,” he told the Times. “That’s a lot more infections than have occurred in China alone.”
“The information we have out of China, at least at the moment, is the variant that’s circulating mostly and driving the rising cases in China is a variant that we’ve already seen in Australia,” Paul Kelly, chief medical officer of Australia, was quoted by The Guardian as saying.
However, Australia later also imposed testing requirements on travelers from China.
Health officials from the 27-member EU bloc said they will continue talks on a common approach to travel rules. However, the EU’s executive arm said the BF.7 Omicron variant prevalent in China was already circulating in Europe and that its threat had not significantly grown.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom said on Dec 30 that it will require travelers from China to provide negative COVID test results.
The Guardian reported that scientists have dismissed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to impose the tests, calling it a “purely political maneuver”.
Scientists said testing travelers from the Chinese mainland will “make no difference to the rise or fall” in the number of COVID-19 cases in the UK.
“I don’t think it’s likely the UK will get any public health benefit from this measure,” Professor Mark Woolhouse from the University of Edinburgh was quoted as saying. “This can only have been done for political reasons.”
The systematic pre-departure or on-arrival testing of travelers from the Chinese mainland is “neither scientifically justified nor risk-based”, the Europe branch of Airports Council International said.
Some countries’ entry restrictions, which target only China, lack scientific basis, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Jan 3.
China is firmly opposed to manipulating virus prevention measures for political purposes, and will respond to such practices according to the principle of reciprocity, Mao said.