Italy urges rest of Europe to follow its lead in Covid testing travellers from China

Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni says she ‘hopes and expects’ other nations to follow suit

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni (AP)

Italy has urged the rest of the EU to follow its lead and test travellers from China for Covid-19.

The EU's health officials could not agree on one course of action when they held talks on Thursday morning and said they would continue discussions later.

This is not the first time EU countries have been split on Covid policies. At the start of the pandemic there was much debate on what to do, and heated competition to buy safety equipment, before member states pulled together and successfully placed - and shared - joint vaccine orders.

Italy "expects and hopes" that the EU will impose mandatory Covid tests for all passengers flying in from China like Rome did, the country's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said.

The scale of the outbreak in China and doubts over official data have prompted countries including the United States and Japan to impose new travel rules on Chinese visitors as Beijing lifted its restrictions.

In the EU, so far only Italy has ordered Covid-19 antigen swabs for all travellers coming from China. This risks not being effective if others in the bloc, where people travel freely from one country to another, will not do the same, Meloni said.

The main airport in the Italian city of Milan started testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai on 26 December and found that almost half of those on two flights were infected.

However, Brigitte Autran, head of the French health risk assessment committee COVARS, told France's Radio Classique: "From a scientific point of view, there is no reason at this stage to bring back controls at the borders."

Ms Autran, who advises the government on epidemiological risks, told that for now the situation was under control and that there were no signs of worrying new Covid variants in China.

Germany and Portugal have also said they saw no need for new travel restrictions, while Austria has stressed the economic benefits of Chinese tourists' return to Europe.

Norway, which is not an EU member but is part of the bloc's border-free deal, was taking a similar approach.

"We likely have several hundred thousand people getting Covid in Norway every week now," Professor Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health wrote on Twitter. "A few hundred extra cases among travelers from China would be a drop in the ocean."

Elsewhere in Europe, Britain has also said it currently had no plans to bring back Covid testing for those coming into the country.

The EU health committee, made of officials from health ministries across the bloc and chaired by the Commission, ended its morning meeting with a call for a united stance.

"We need to act jointly & will continue our discussions," the European Commission said in a tweet, without specifying when talks would resume.

China's borders have been all but shut to travellers from other nations since early 2020, soon after the coronavirus first emerged in its central city of Wuhan, but it has announced it will do away with a quarantine for inbound travellers from 8 January.

The re-opening raises the prospect of Chinese tourists returning to shopping streets around the world, once a market worth hundreds of billions a year globally.

Reuters