“This will be an additional monitoring objective to verify that the data we receive from China is accurate,” Steven Van Gucht of the Sciensano national public health institute told Reuters.
At a press conference announcing the new measures, Belgian Health minister Frank Vandenbroucke said that a European Union-wide policy was needed for China’s COVID surge.
EU health officials will hold talks on Wednesday on a coordinated response.
Pandemic Spreading in China
According to the U.N.’s World Health Organisation (WHO), China started seeing elevated cases of COVID-19 long before it lifted its harsh zero-COVID restrictions in the first week of December.Beijing has also dismissed any criticism of its COVID-19 statistics, while downplaying the risk presented by new variants, saying that it expects any mutations to be more infectious but less severe.
The CCP’s control and censorship of information has made it hard to verify the extent and nature of reports of a more severe strain, given the range of responses to the virus between patients.
The Chinese people and health officials from different countries are grappling again with the ongoing lack of transparency about COVID-19 in China, particularly given the impossibly low COVID-19 infection numbers and death tolls in official reports.
As of Dec. 23, 2022, India reported 530,690 COVID-19 deaths to the WHO, while China has reported only 31,585 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
In December, Chinese people were posting to social media reports of COVID-19 patients suffering symptoms similar to the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain, which many feared was unlike the milder symptoms associated with Omicron strains.
WHO Meets With China
The WHO on Dec. 30 met with China’s health officials and asked them to share details and real-time developments on the COVID outbreak that is wreaking havoc across the country.“There’s a little narrative at the moment that in some way, China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden, the disease is out of control. The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease, and I believe that the Chinese authorities have decided strategically that that for them is not the best option anymore.”
However, the CCP has now adopted the approach at the other extreme of the policy spectrum, completely lifting restrictions and unleashing the virus into a population that had endured three years of mandatory testing and centralized quarantine at great social and economic cost.
Without the CCP sharing sequencing data as COVID-19 spreads and claims more lives in China, governments are now implementing their own initiatives to monitor for emerging variants—particularly ahead of Jan. 8, the date from which Beijing will lift its long-standing travel restrictions and allow residents to travel internationally again.
Previously under its zero-COVID policy, Chinese authorities were not issuing passports. Now, as a severe COVID wave spreads throughout the country, the CCP is choosing to lift its prior restrictions to allow Chinese to travel around the world, as well as visitors to reenter China.
Many countries, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Italy, have imposed new testing rules on travelers from China ahead of Jan. 8.
