Domestic tourists wait for hours to board buses leaving hotels and isolation facilities from Guangzhou Baiyun Airport in Guangdong province, southern China on December 25.
Emily Wang Fujiyama/AP
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Emily Wang Fujiyama/AP
Domestic tourists wait for hours to board buses leaving hotels and isolation facilities from Guangzhou Baiyun Airport in Guangdong province, southern China on December 25.
Emily Wang Fujiyama/AP
The United States will require travelers from China, Hong Kong, and Macau to test negative for COVID-19 before entering the United States as restrictions ease and cases increase in China.
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced measures Wednesday will go into effect January 5 for all passengers over the age of 2. Passengers must present a negative PCR or monitored antigen test no more than two days prior to departure, whether it is a direct flight or an indirect flight via another country.
Supervised testing must be supervised by a telehealth service or licensed provider and authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
CDC points out increasing number of COVID-19 cases in China and “lack of complete and transparent genomic and epidemiological sequence data reported from” that country.
“Reducing the number of tests and case reports in (China) and the sharing of virus genome sequence data to a minimum could slow the identification process,” the CDC said in a press release. identify worrying new variants if they arise”.
Passengers also flying through South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, Toronto Pearson International and Vancouver International will be required to provide a negative test result if they have been in China in the past 10 days.
“These three hubs serve the majority of passengers whose journeys originate in China and the Special Administrative Regions,” the CDC said.
Passengers who test positive more than 10 days before their flight can provide documentation of virus clearance in lieu of negative test results.
The move to require testing for all passengers from China, Hong Kong or Macau comes two days after China reduction quarantine requirements for passengers arriving from abroad, effective January 8.
Protests spread against China’s COVID-free policies broke out across the country in November, making China return a range of measures, including mass testing. But with the easing of restrictions came a COVID spike Chinese public health officials say it could infect a total of 800 million people in the next few months.
The United States is also expanding its voluntary genomic testing (TGS) program, which collects anonymous nasal swab samples from incoming international travelers to detect new and rare COVID variants. CDC is adding Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport to bring the total number of airports participating in the program to seven.
“During the first weeks of the Omicron spike, TGS detected two sub-variants of Omicron, BA.2 and BA.3, and reported them to the global database weeks before they were reported. reported elsewhere, demonstrating that the program can detect variants early,” the CDC said.
