Grim China prediction as Australia backflips on traveller controls
Fears continue to grow that the explosion of Covid-19 in China could spawn a new sub-variant of concern, with experts warning the country's intense secrecy around its current outbreak could make it harder for other nations to react.
After resisting it for days, the Australian government announced on Sunday it will introduce new controls on Chinese travellers, requiring them to take a mandatory Covid test before boarding a flight Down Under. Australia has joined the United States, England, Italy, South Korea, Japan, India and Taiwan to enforce the measure.
From January 5, passengers from China will need to take a test within 48 hours before travel and show evidence of a negative result, Health Minister Mark Butler announced.
He cited the "lack of comprehensive information" Beijing was providing to the international community.
"The decision to implement these temporary measures has been made out of an abundance of caution, taking into account the dynamic and evolving situation in China and the potential for new variants to emerge in an environment of high transmission," Mr Butler said.
Meanwhile the European Union health chief has written to the health ministers of all 27 of the bloc's member countries, urging them to scale up up genomic sequencing of infections and the monitoring of waste water, including from airports, to detect any new variants emanating from China.
Health experts from across the globe have called on China to be more transparent about the unfolding outbreak.
The editorial board of The Washington Post called for more action against China on New Year's Eve, likening the situation to the start of the pandemic when the virus rapidly spread from China to Europe, the US and elsewhere.
"Because China refuses to be transparent about the cases, deaths and genomics, the only way to detect variants is to be vigilant outside its borders," it said.
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While China has not been transparent about case deaths, anecdotally, the virus has exploded across its major cities in recent weeks as the government made a dramatic U-turn on its strict Covid-zero policy and largely abandoned testing.
Prior to Sunday, the Albanese government had resisted pressure to follow other countries with imposing Covid requirements on Chinese travellers.
China's Covid explosion 'a worry' as new variant concerns grow
Professor Adrian Esterman, an Epidemiologist at the University of South Australia, says the obviously huge number of cases in China increases the odds of a new mutation of the virus developing.
"The more cases there are in the world the more chances there are of variants turning up," he told the ABC this week.
"Clearly these millions and millions of cases in China are a worry is terms of getting new sub-variants."
Whether any new sub-variant makes it to Australia and does any damage remains an unknown, he said.
"Basically the virus is doing things we never understood would happen with a virus," he said. "For example, why haven't we seen a new variant in the last 12 months? We simply don't know. All we know that Omicron keeps developing these new sub-variants – they all seem to be converging into a very immune invasive version ... But tomorrow there might be a totally new variant occurring somewhere in the world including China that could be both more transmissible and more severe than Omicron."
Leading epidemiologist Professor Angela Webster from the University of Sydney agreed, saying Australia needs to better understand any variants emerging in China.
"There could be new variants in China rapidly circulating and therefore potentially spreading to the rest of the world that we are unprepared for and we haven't been able to learn much about before it happens," she told the ABC on Friday.
She said PCR tests were used to sequence Covid-19 strains as Australia monitors the number of severe infections and hospitalisations while assessing the impact the virus during the holidays.
"It may be we have to reinstate more routine testing here to ensure that any incoming variants aren't completely different," she warned.
with AAP
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