EU set to demand pre-departure Covid testing for travellers from China

The EU is expected to impose pre-departure Covid-19 tests on travellers from China within days to try to prevent a surge in infections in that country spreading to Europe.

The “overwhelming majority” of the 27 EU members asked for the move at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, a European Commission spokesman said.

Three countries — France, Spain and Italy — have already said they will introduce controls on visitors from China, such as demanding evidence of a recent negative Covid test or proof of vaccination.

EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides said an emergency meeting on Wednesday would take the final decision and that capitals had “converged” on a requirement for pre-departure testing.

“Unity remains our strongest tool against Covid,” she said.

China is opening up from a lengthy lockdown, sparking a rise in infections in the world’s second-biggest economy.

The health security committee of member state officials produced a draft opinion recommending several measures.

These include recommending the wearing of masks on flights from China and a “discussion on pre-departure testing of passengers”, said the commission spokesman. There should also be monitoring of the wastewater from aircraft, genomic surveillance at airports and increased monitoring and sequencing.

The EU should also step up testing and vaccination of its own population.

Governments have sharply changed tack since a meeting last week of the same committee rejected the idea of pre-flight testing. The move happened despite a report by the bloc’s disease control agency on Tuesday saying that Chinese travellers would not increase the risk to EU citizens.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, which monitors threats in the EU and European Economic Area countries Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, said the variants circulating in China are already prevalent in the region.

“As such [they] are not challenging for the immune response of EU/EEA citizens,” the centre said. “In addition, EU/EEA citizens have relatively high immunisation and vaccination levels.”

Given the higher level of immunity in the population, as well as the previous pattern of emergence of variants and subvariants of the disease in Europe, a surge in cases in China was “not expected to impact the Covid-19 epidemiological situation” in the EU and EEA, the ECDC added.

Lars Danielsson, EU ambassador of Sweden, which took over the EU’s rotating presidency from the Czech Republic at the start of the year, nevertheless predicted governments would back pre-flight tests.

“I’m sure that we can agree on some sort of recommendations on restrictions for travellers from China. I don’t see that as very dramatic,” Danielsson told the Financial Times.

The move came as Beijing rejected an EU offer to send western-made Covid-19 vaccines. China’s domestically produced vaccines require three doses to offer the same protection from serious illness as two doses of those produced in the west, according to the World Health Organization.

Beijing on Tuesday said the situation was “under control”, citing the “strengthening clinical efficacy” of its “ample” domestic jabs.

The ECDC repeated its assessment that the probability of Europeans being infected with Covid in the coming weeks was “very high”. Its weekly data report found that in the week ending December 18 2022, the number of people aged over 65 across the EU/EEA with Covid increased by 7 per cent compared with the previous week.

In addition, 11 of the 21 countries with data on hospital admissions and intensive care bed occupancy reported an increasing trend in at least one of those indicators. The death rate decreased by 11 per cent compared with the previous week; 2,009 fatalities linked to Covid-19 were reported across the EU and EEA.