China bridles as EU states prepare to scale up Covid monitoring

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European countries are preparing to scale up the monitoring of potential new coronavirus variants from China, as Spain becomes the second EU state to bring back mandatory testing at airports in response to Beijing’s rapid rollback of anti-infection measures.

Spain on Friday followed Italy’s lead by requiring arrivals from China to show a negative test result, though unlike Rome it makes exceptions for those who can prove they are fully vaccinated.

At a press conference announcing the new measures, the Spanish health minister, Carolina Darias, also said she was pushing to revise the conditions that had to be met in order for travellers to obtain the EU’s digital Covid certificate.

A rise in infections across China and doubts over the regime’s official data have prompted the return of Covid checks in several countries outside the EU, including the US, India, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Chinese state media said the return of such testing requirements for travellers from China was “discriminatory” and politically motivated in an attempt to undermine China’s reopening.

In Brussels, Berlin and Paris, however, officials said this week it was important to be vigilant but too early to raise alarm over the outbreak in the world’s most populous country.

Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, said it was “not yet necessary” to bring back mandatory testing for travellers coming into the borderless Schengen area from China via Germany.

Data on Covid variants provided by Beijing was not sufficiently reliable, the centre-left politician said. “And therefore we very much have to rely on doing that ourselves,” for example by carefully looking at individual flights, he said.

The European Commission’s health policy chief on Friday urged the EU’s 27 member states to consider scaling up gene sequencing of Covid-19 infections and monitoring of wastewater, including from airports, to detect any new variants that could be brought in from China.

In a letter to health ministers of the EUmember states, Stella Kyriakides said the bloc should be “very vigilant” when China lifts travel restrictions on 8 January, since reliable epidemiological and testing data for China were quite scarce.

In the letter, Kyriakides advised ministers to assess their practices on gene sequencing of the coronavirus “as an immediate step”, Reuters reported.

Earlier in the week, Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, argued that requiring Covid tests for all passengers from China was “only effective if it is taken at the European level”, noting that many people arrive in Italy on connecting flights through other European countries.

Following an announcement made by Italy’s health ministry on Thursday, travellers from China are obliged to show a negative test result upon embarking on their flight and to take a second antigen test upon their arrival.