Chinese travelers are willing to go abroad again. Some countries are hesitant

Hong Kong (CNN) – Covid outbreak in China. Countries imposing travel restrictions on Chinese travelers, fearful of importing the virus. Scientists warn of fomenting fear and xenophobia.

But this is not early 2020. The familiar scene is playing out now as China grapples with its largest outbreak ever, after abandoning its strict zero Covid approach and partially reopening its borders three years into the pandemic.

Nearly half of the 212 passengers who arrived at Italy’s Milan airport from China on Monday have tested positive for COVID-19, the regional health official said on Wednesday.

But as countries including the United States and Japan move to impose restrictions, others such as France and Great Britain have made clear they are ready to welcome Chinese travelers — who, before the pandemic, were a major driver of international tourism.

China responded by claiming to have its Covid situation “under control”, and accused Western media of “distorting” the recent policy changes.

“The real intention is to sabotage China’s three-year Covid-19 control efforts and attack the country’s system,” the state-run Global Times said in an article Thursday, citing experts who called the restrictions “unfounded” and “discriminatory.”

What states impose testing requirements?

Japan announced on Tuesday that all travelers who have been to or traveled to mainland China within seven days will be tested upon arrival from Friday, and that the government will limit the number of flights to and from China.

The country’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, pointed out the lack of official data from the Chinese government. “While there is information that the infection is spreading rapidly in mainland China, concern is growing in Japan where it is difficult to understand the detailed situation,” he said.

Indian authorities have applied similar advisories to travelers not only from China, but also many nearby locations including Japan, South Korea and Thailand. The guidelines aim to ensure that Covid does not spread as quickly as it has in China, authorities said on Tuesday.

Taiwan also announced mandatory on-arrival tests for travelers arriving from mainland China on Wednesday. The self-governing island has banned mainland Chinese tourists since the pandemic, and only allows Chinese nationals to visit for business or family reasons.

In all three places, people who test positive on arrival will be required to self-quarantine for several days.

In Europe, both Spain and Italy have tightened their restrictions. Spain now requires a negative Covid-19 test or proof of full vaccination for visitors from China, while Italy has reinstated mandatory testing. The UK said it was considering whether to introduce new rules.

The measures are especially surprising given that most of these places — especially in the West — long ago reopened their borders and dropped testing requirements as part of the transition to living with Covid.

In Europe, Italy – the first country on the continent to experience a large-scale outbreak in 2020 – announced that it would require Covid tests for all travelers arriving from China, with the health minister saying it was necessary to identify “any variants… in order to protect the Italian people”.

On Thursday, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said the increase in the number of cases in China was not expected to affect the EU’s Covid situation, calling the restrictions on travelers from China “unjustified”.

Are variants a risk?

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledged the risk of a new variant emerging in the “unvaccinated population.”

“Even though (in China) officially 90% of the population has been vaccinated with two doses of inactivated vaccines, you still have a significant proportion of the elderly who have not been vaccinated…and many of the people who were vaccinated did so more than six months ago.” So their antibody levels are already very low.” “So we cannot rule out the possibility that new variants have already appeared in China and spread to other parts of the world.”

Noting the speed of the outbreak in China, a US federal health official said, “With so many people infected in China in such a short period of time, there is the opportunity and potential for a new variant to emerge.”

US officials have also expressed concerns about China’s lack of transparency about the recent increase in the number of cases, particularly the absence of genome sequence information that could help detect new strains of the coronavirus.

However, GISEAD, a global virus database, said Chinese authorities were providing more genomic information from recent samples — and these appeared to match variants already circulating globally.

A country’s best defense against potential variants, said Karen Gribben, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, is to focus on domestic policies that protect its population — such as increasing vaccinations, maintaining social distancing and more. Basic public health measures.

“In many parts of the world, the epidemic seems to be over… but ultimately (these measures) are ultimately what prevents transmission of the virus,” she said.

“If countries are at the point where they think these things are no longer important, because for example they have developed a lot of population immunity, then why do we care about two new cases coming out of China?”

Are the procedures effective?

Despite the potential risks, many health experts have widely criticized the new testing requirements as ineffective at best and alarming at worst.

“I don’t see any compelling reason to justify this step,” said Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations. “So far we have no evidence to support whether there are indeed such variants emerging in mainland China.”

“I can understand concerns about the lack of transparency, about not sharing genetic sequences,” he added. “But even with a ban, we cannot prevent the virus from spreading. And assuming that there are indeed new variants emerging in mainland China, we will only delay the spread, not prevent the virus from spreading to other parts of the world.”

Jriban echoed this point, saying, “In fact, we don’t have the scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of these measures in practice.”

If a contagious variant were to emerge, it would likely enter the United States via other countries anyway, she said, noting that the restrictions “did little” when Omicron emerged last fall.

Pre-departure testing — which the US requires — is also somewhat effective, she added, since many of the new variants have a short incubation period, which means “there will still be cases that will survive.”

Political pressure and xenophobia

Gribbin said there are a few reasons why states are imposing these restrictions despite their questionable use — one is the fear that Chinese Covid patients might flee elsewhere to get treatment with hospitals at home completely flooded.

But, she added, this is completely unlikely. Travel volume from China remains very low, in part due to the limited number of flights. And at the rate of spread of Covid, it will be a logistical challenge for infected patients to obtain visas and book flights immediately.

Instead, the latest wave of restrictions likely reflects “political pressure (on the authorities) to appear to be doing something,” she said. “We see one country do that and then others follow suit.”

Experts also warn that excluding China could increase the risk of more anti-Chinese racism, as we saw early in the pandemic when Asians around the world faced discrimination and violent hate crimes.

Huang said China isn’t the only place seeing an uptick in cases. “I don’t understand why China should be treated differently than other countries like Australia, for example, which are swimming in Covid,” he added.

The US is likely importing tens of thousands of cases from around the world so far, Greban said, adding that 1 to 3% of all international travelers have Covid — so there is no point in specifically targeting Covid from one country.

“We’ve seen this throughout the pandemic — when certain measures target people coming from a certain place, it reinforces stereotypes or beliefs that viruses come from certain parts of the world… It simply isn’t true,” she said.

Which countries welcome back Chinese travelers?

By contrast, many countries have opened their doors welcomingly.

The tourism departments and embassies of France, Thailand, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Austria and Switzerland have posted messages on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, to invite Chinese tourists.

“Chinese friends, France welcomes you with open arms!” The French embassy wrote on Weibo. The Thai National Tourism Administration wrote: “Thailand has been waiting for you for three years!”

Many Weibo users celebrated the newfound freedom of travel, with the hashtag “where to go abroad next year” garnering nearly 80 million views.

China alone contributed 51% of the travel and tourism GDP in the Asia-Pacific region in 2018, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. Chinese travelers typically account for 30% of all arrivals in Thailand.

Cheng Cheng, Pierre Millhan, Kevin Liptak, Valentina DiDonato, Eric Cheung, Amy Jozuka, Gabe Greitner, Lauren Kent, and CNN’s Beijing bureau contributed reporting.