CDC reinstates COVID-19 testing for flights from China
The CDC additionally mentioned it’s increasing a voluntary program that exams passengers arriving from not less than 30 international locations and sequences variants from optimistic circumstances. This system will now embrace airports in Los Angeles and Seattle, encompassing 500 flights every week, together with 290 flights from China.
The U.S. follows a number of different international locations in implementing the testing requirement on vacationers from China after the nation introduced plans to ease its border restrictions starting Jan. 8 as a part of the change in coverage on COVID-19. Specialists have debated the effectiveness of the coverage, contemplating COVID-19’s world presence and the time lag between a passenger taking a check and boarding a airplane. However the lack of transparency into China’s information additionally raises explicit considerations.
“What must be clear is what’s the goal of this coverage and the way can we consider it,” Infectious Illnesses Society of America President Carlos del Rio tweeted.
China’s surge in circumstances is troublesome to quantify due to the federal government’s selections to cut back information reporting and to restrict the definition of COVID-19 deaths to these attributable to respiratory failure.
The World Well being Group lately referred to as on China to launch extra thorough statistics, with Mike Ryan, government director of WHO Well being Emergencies Programme, warning that the nation’s present methodology “will very a lot underestimate the true loss of life toll.”
