An earlier official requested the government to take into account testing visitors from China for Covid. Ben Wallace stated that the Department of Transport would consult with the Department of Health and heed medical advice.
When asked if the government would take constraints into consideration, Mr. Wallace responded, “The government is looking at that, it’s under review, we observed obviously what the US has done and what India and, I believe, Italy have looked at it. Naturally, we always monitor any potential health hazards to the UK, no matter where they may be.”
Several nations are currently requiring testing of tourists from China, including the US, Japan, Italy, and Malaysia.
Following Beijing’s decision to effectively terminate its zero-Covid policy, there was an increase in instances in China.
Will Quince, the UK’s health minister, stated that the government was taking the situation “incredibly seriously” and that he understood that many people would be concerned about the “news coming out of China.”
The “key threat,” according to him, would be a new version from China, but there was “no evidence at this point of all that.”
2019 saw the issuance of 813,532 visas to Chinese nationals seeking to visit the UK. Over the next two years, this decreased to less than 200,000 as a result of Beijing’s stringent Covid border restrictions.
There are worries that a new strain could appear in China and spread swiftly due to international travel.
There are opportunities for viruses to adapt or evolve in potentially hazardous ways when there are many of them present in a population.
The Scottish government, however, stated that it does not presently have any plans to alter the conditions for travelling and that it will keep working with the UK Health Security Agency and other nations to “monitor the spread of harmful varieties.”
The UK’s most recent figures indicate that one in every 45 citizens is infected. Although they cannot prevent illnesses, vaccines are saving lives. Instead, specialists are monitoring the virus to determine whether the vaccines need to be updated to better address any important new mutations.
There haven’t been any particularly concerning new variations of the virus, and science is currently keeping up with it.
Analysts claim that China significantly undercounts the number of cases it reports each day, which may really be closer to one million than the country’s reported 5,000 cases each day.
According to Prof. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, the current scenario in China is unlikely to lead to a significant increase in the number of Covid cases in the UK or globally as a whole.
The US announced on Wednesday that it would start requiring Covid tests for visitors entering the country from China, Hong Kong, and Macau as of 5 January due to a lack of “adequate and transparent” Covid data in China.
