The United States has joined Italy on Wednesday and will require passengers arriving from China to have a negative COVID-19 test or antigen test within two days before flying in response to the easing of restrictions and the increase in positive cases in the Asian country.
The measure will apply from January 5 to both passengers flying directly to the United States from China, Hong Kong or Macau and passengers flying via third country links, including Seoul, Toronto and Vancouver, as reported by CNN.
«Pre-departure testing and the requirement to show a negative result decreases the number of infected passengers boarding planes and will help curb the spread of the virus as we work to identify and understand potential variants that may emerge,» said a Center for Disease Control and Prevention official, Henry Walke.
In this sense, federal health officials have justified the measure, which has been notified in advance to the airlines, due to the lack of transparency in the positives and transmission chains in China, as reported by NBC.
In view of this situation, some countries, such as Italy and Japan or Malaysia, have already begun to require COVID-19 testing of Chinese citizens to enter their territories. In fact, the Italian Ministry of Health will test all passengers arriving from China.
For his part, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, has asked the Chinese government to take «appropriate measures to protect the French» both at national and European level in the face of the increase of positives in the country, as reported by France Info.
Xi Jinping’s administration announced Monday that it will reopen its borders from January 8 and eliminate the need for quarantine in a new step in the relaxation of restrictions.
China was the country where COVID-19 was first detected and has so far officially confirmed 4.4 million cases and 16,764 deaths. In the past 28 days, 815,995 cases and 787 deaths related to the disease have been reported.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
