The easing of anti-Covid restrictions in China and the quarantine freeze coming into effect on January 8 could turn into a global catastrophea few days before Chinese New Year, the most important holiday of the year, when millions of people take to the streets again to reunite with family and friends within the country or across borders after a three-year hiatus. Just half an hour after the announcement, travel agencies were stormed with the concrete possibility of triggering a new Covid wave with a very high risk of new variants in the rest of the world.
The Lombardy region was the first in Italy to request the molecular swab for passengers arriving from China. A banner on the airport’s website informs passengers of the new regulation, valid until January 30, with a reference to Viaggiare Sifi’s website, which states that “The Lombardy Region ATS INSUBRIA, the reference for Malpensa Airport, has advised all passengers/operators from China to undergo a molecular swab screening for Covid-19”. This is a preventive measure – currently not mandatory – which also serves to identify the type of Covid variant of those arriving from the Asian country. 90 swabs were taken yesterday, 120 today and tomorrow we will have the first sequencing results.
Defense measures against the virus have also been decided in countries such as Japan and India, but where swabs are mandatory.
In China, the explosion in the number of infections and deaths has been difficult to measure since early December, when strict anti-Covid containment measures were scrapped following civil protests also because of the stop of data transfer decided by the authorities a few days ago. But the figures circulating are alarming. According to British research company Airfinity, there are currently over a million new cases every day and at least 5,000 deaths. And the situation is likely to get worse. Models developed by Airfinity suggest between 1.3 and 2.1 million deaths as a result of the current Covid wave in China. The company estimates that it will record 3.7 million infections per day in mid-January to reach 4.2 million daily cases in March. The virus spreads on people’s legs, virologists from around the world obsessively repeated during the darkest months of the pandemic, marked by the lockdowns. And now that mass testing has been suspended and Chinese travel liberalized, the fallout seems worrying.
Half an hour after the National Health Commission announced it was reopening for travel, data from travel platform Ctrip showed searches for cross-border destinations have increased 10-fold: top picks include Macau, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand and South Korea Another platform, Qunar, showed that 15 minutes after the news broke, searches for international flights increased sevenfold. Just Japan today announced a defense strategy. By decision of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, travelers from China will be forced to have a swab test starting Friday and those who are positive will have to undergo a 7-day quarantine. Tokyo is also considering limiting the number of flights from China, Hong Kong and Macau. India, for its part, had already decided that travelers from China and other countries would have to show a negative test. The European Union, on the other hand, has not taken any action. Although, a Commission spokesman warned, “an emergency brake was maintained which could be activated if necessary to reintroduce the restrictions”. In Italy, Matteo Bassetti, director of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino Hospital in Genoa, took the field to call for a “barrier” because “what we are risking today is much worse than what happened with Wuhan”. For Bassetti, “we need checks on all flights from China, travel restrictions, molecular swabs for passengers in the 24 hours before departure or quarantine on arrival with a molecular test to get out of there, otherwise the arrivals are not allowed to circulate,” measures that should be at least six across Europe months to be taken. The data Bassetti cites is the worst of them all: “Encrypted emails from Chinese sources report staggering numbers, such as 325 million Chinese infected in 20 days, around 10,000 deaths per day and at least 29 variants of Omicron, some of which are among those who evade the vaccine in everything”.