(Finance) – “In light of the abolition of travel restrictions announced by the Chinese government and which will come into force on January 8, I urge you to remain very vigilant as epidemiological data or reliable tests for China are rather scarce, coverage vaccination rate in China is low, and there is no equivalence decision between Chinese vaccination or recovery certificates and the EU’s Covid-19 digital certificate”. That’s what she writes EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides in a letter sent to the 27 member countries after yesterday’s meeting of the Health Security Committee.
“I would like to invite you to evaluate your current practices of genomic surveillance of the SARS CoV2 virus: if it has been scaled down due to the new domestic phase, you might consider increasing it again. It would then be important to continue or start a water surveillance wastewater, which includes wastewater from major airports – continues the commissioner –. If a new variant of the SARS-CoV2 virus appears, in China or in the EU, we need to detect it early to be ready to react quickly. At the EU level we are developing some key messages for European travelers intending to travel to China. We will also be making messages available for travelers from China to the EU. Messages for airline and airport staff are also being developed. These messages will be available in the next few days and will be translated into the official languages of the EU and into Chinese, to facilitate their adaptation to the national situation. The EU Health Security Committee has shown that there is broad consensus that member countries need to act in a coordinated manner if measures are to be effective. Information and transparency about measures and a science-based approach have been our guiding principles throughout the duration of the pandemic and continue to be essential at this stage if we are to effectively protect the EU from international health threats of this nature. During the meeting, some member states proposed measures such as random testing of travellers. In the coming days and weeks, I will be calling for the work of the Health Security Committee to continue and I would be very grateful if you could ensure that your country is adequately represented at these meetings and that our ambition is to coordinate our responses and our measures in the most effective and scientific way possible”.
But if, on the one hand, the Health Security Committee – EU Health Security Committeesays yes to concerted action, on the other comes a cold shower from European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC: screening of travelers from China is “unwarranted”. The EU agency recalled that the countries of the Union have “relatively high levels of immunization and vaccination” and “the variants circulating in China are already circulating in the EU”. And it is precisely because of the greater immunity of the European population, and the “previous appearance and subsequent replacement of the variants currently in circulation in China”, that the agency has defined as “unjustified the checks and travel measures on travelers from China” . Potential imported infections were “pretty low” compared to the numbers we already have on a daily basis, and which health systems “are currently able to handle,” the ECDC added. A reference to the ordinance with which last Wednesday the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci has ordered mandatory Covid-19 antigenic swabs, and related virus sequencing, for all passengers from China and in transit through Italy. “The measure – explained the minister – is essential to ensure the surveillance and identification of any variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population”.
There Spain has, however, decided to adopt the same line as Italy with respect to travelers from China, asking them for a negative coronavirus test to be able to enter the country, thus becoming the second European country to have applied restrictions on arrivals from China after that President Xi Jinping has decided to remove the Covid-zero policy, with a consequent increase in infections and deaths linked to the infection. Outside the European Union, restrictions on travelers from China have been imposed by the United States, Japan, India, Taiwan and South Korea. Measures described by the Chinese media as “unfounded and discriminatory”.
China, for its part, said it has “always been transparent” with regards to “information on Covid-19”, including information on the “number of deaths” caused by the coronavirus in the country. A senior health official in Beijing, the director of the Jiao Yahui National Health Commission Medical Administration office, at the press conference he specified that the criteria relating to deaths from coronavirus are divided into two categories at a global level. Some countries only count the cases of people who tested positive for nucleic acid tests after becoming infected with the new coronavirus and died from virus-induced respiratory failure, she said as quoted by Chinese media. Other countries, Jiao continued, include all deaths within 28 days of positive tests for Covid-19. ”This means that their count could also include those who committed suicide or died in road accidents after contracting the virus – says Jiao Yahui -. Since 2020, the death criterion for Covid-19 that we are adopting in China has been of the first type”.
Meanwhile, Italy is taking precautions and raising its guard. “To strengthen the monitoring of the epidemiological evolution deriving from the potential risks associated with the situation that has arisen in the People’s Republic of China” Schillaci has summoned the Crisis Unit for today as an observatory of the ministry on the subject”.
“The information from China is scarce and to be considered unreliable”, but “indicates that the variants that are fueling this new massive wave of infections are the same ones that have already been circulating globally for some time, still within the sub-variants of Omicron. The same subvariant BF.7, on which fears are concentrated, probably unfounded, is an evolution of the BA.5 which has already been circulating for some time also in our latitudes and is less immunoevasive than the BQ variants currently dominant in North America and Europe”. said yesterday the health minister in the’information provided to the Senate on the Covid situation.
Yesterday Schillaci signed thefurther extension until 30 April 2023 of the obligation to use masks in health, social and health facilities, including outpatient clinics and general practitioners’ offices”. The minister also announced that “as regards further measures in our country, we have strengthened the close monitoring of the variants through the so-called ‘Flash Surveys’ conducted monthly in collaboration with the Regions, the ‘I-Co-Gen’ platform of the ‘Istituto Superiore di Sanità which collects continuous information on the trend of the variants identified in the main Italian laboratories and the study of the variants present in wastewater; defined the Preparedness Plan for the management of the circulation of COVID in the winter season 2022-20232”.