The United States on Wednesday said that the restrictions imposed on flyers from China are because of the “lack of adequate and transparent” data from Beijing over the omicron subvariants that has the potential to spread beyond its borders.
While responding to a query on restrictions over travellers from China, States Department Spokesperson Ned Price said, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended this approach because of the spread of Covid within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and also because of the lack of adequate and transparent ethnological and viral genomic sequence data being reported from the PRC.” “It is the lack of transparency that has compounded our concern for the potential for a variant to emerge in the PRC and potentially to spread well beyond its border,” he added.
Notably, the US government, earlier, announced that it will require all visitors from China to present a negative Covid-19 test result before boarding a flight to the country, CNN reported. Through a telehealth service, the testing can be either PCR tests or antigen self-tests.
Price mentioned the meeting between China’s officials and World Health Organization (WHO) that took place on December 3.
He recalled WHO’s emergencies director’s statement and said, “the statement from WHO’s emergencies director that the current number being in public in China is ‘under represent’ to the true impact of disease in terms of hospital admissions, ICU admissions and particularly, in terms of deaths.”(ANI)
