The US will also ask passengers flying to the US from Seoul, Toronto and Vancouver if they have been in China during the previous 10 days. If so, they will also have to submit a negative test within two days of their departure to the US.
The move came amid growing concern in Washington and elsewhere about China’s spiralling Covid-19 outbreak in recent weeks, which came after Chinese authorities quickly unwound a sprawling network of testing programmes and other pandemic restrictions in place for nearly three years.
The US officials said that Chinese authorities have been withholding critical information about the viruses spreading across China right now, and that those viruses could lead to new variants taking hold globally.
“As of this morning, the percentage of reported cases that are sequenced and shared by the PRC is .036 per cent, compared to about 4.4 per cent of the US cases,” one of the officials said. “We don’t know – we won’t know – the nature of the variants that might be circulating.”
The US new policy follows a similar restriction recently instituted in Japan, which require negative Covid-19 test results for any arriving passengers who had been in mainland China in the preceding week.
Officially, Beijing has reported only a few thousand new infections each day in China since its zero-Covid policies were eased. But mass testing there ended and asymptomatic cases were excluded from statistics earlier this month, rendering the numbers meaningless.
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Japan mandates Covid-19 testing for visitors from mainland China amid Covid-19 surge
Reports of medicine shortages, overstretched hospitals and emergency services, acute blood shortages and paralysed delivery services suggest the extent of Covid-19 in mainland cities.
In a brief statement, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said it would stop releasing data on daily Covid-19 caseloads from Sunday, without providing an explanation.
But estimates of daily infections released by local health authorities have shed some light on the situation.
In February 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic, arrivals from China were the first passengers to be subject to a US travel ban. Border officials restricted all foreign nationals coming from the country from entering the US.
A Covid-19 patient being treated at Tianjin First Centre Hospital in Tianjin on Wednesday. Photo: AFP
That restriction did not include immediate family members of US citizens and permanent residents, who were expected to quarantine for up to two weeks after arriving in the US.
Travellers from China are facing renewed entry restrictions in a slew of locations worldwide as the country’s Covid-19 infection surge continues.
Taiwan will start testing all arrivals from the mainland for Covid-19 starting January 1, and keep that protocol in place for at least a month, citing the threat posed by “unclear information” about the contagion’s spread.
South Korea, India and Italy have also tightened their rules for visitors from China.
The US officials added that they have offered China assistance with efforts to fight the pandemic in the country, but that Chinese authorities had so far declined any help.
