Australia has joined a growing list of countries imposing a range of protective measures for travellers coming out of China, following the recent surge of COVID cases numbers linked to the CCP’s sudden abandonment of its monolithic zero-COVID policy.
The Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mr Mark Butler, made the announcement on 1 January 2023, at a press conference in Adelaide, in preparation for the lifting of Chinese border restrictions on 8 January 2023 and a large, predicted increase in travel between China and Australia.
“This is really about acting out of an abundance of caution, it is a modest measure that just requires people submit evidence of a negative COVID test [supervised by a medical practitioner] within 48 hours before they board a flight from China, Hong Kong, Macau,” Mr Butler said.
“This arrangement will come into effect 12:01am on the 5th of January, in line with the timing of arrangements from a number of other countries, including the United States and England.
“It can be a supervised rapid antigen test or a PCR test, and otherwise, we are very warmly welcoming the resumption of travel – I know that many hundreds of thousands of Australians of Chinese descent will be relishing the chance to see their family and friends again.”
According to the New York Times on 2 January 2023, officially, an average of 3,842 daily cases were reported in China in the last week, up by 36% from the average two weeks ago, while deaths remained constant – though some sites, such as Our World in Data, report receiving no official Chinese figures since 25 December 2022.
However, Bloomberg News reported on 23 December 2022 that according to minutes from meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC) that Wednesday, up to 248 million people, or almost 18% of the population, could have contracted COVID during the first 20 days of December.
Some estimates stated that of up to 37 million people were infected in just one day in the week leading up to Christmas – more than nine times the previous daily record of some 4 million, set in January 2022.
Despite this, the Chinese government-controlled People’s Daily, reported on 27 December 2022, that China will downgrade management of COVID to Class B, remove the virus from the list of quarantinable infectious diseases, and cancel quarantine requirements for inbound travellers from 8 January 2023.
China has also updated its nomenclature to ‘novel coronavirus infection,’ rather than ‘novel coronavirus pneumonia,’ to reflect Omicron’s impact as the dominant global strain.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which met with China on Friday, 30 December 2022, expressed its concerns about an absence of comprehensive information about the situation there over the weekend, highlighting the lack of genomic sequencing of COVID cases being uploaded by China in real time for the rest of the world to see and share.
“And that genomic sequencing tells us exactly what type of COVID is circulating in a particular country – every other country is doing that now,” Minister Butler said.
“We do it in real-time, so that as a global community, we have a line of sight about what variants are emerging and where. And the WHO and other countries besides have expressed concern that we do not have that information about a very fast evolving COVID wave in the largest country on the planet.
“They said that the measures that we have taken were ‘understandable’ in light of that absence of information.”