The Government is facing pressure to impose Covid tests on passengers arriving from China after Beijing announced it would reopen its borders next month.
China has recently reversed the anti-virus controls that kept it in isolation for nearly three years and announced plans to reissue passports and visas for overseas trips. The country had stopped issuing visas to foreigners and passports to its own people at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.
However, the abrupt end of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy has sparked a reported surge in Covid cases and plans to reopen the borders for the New Year have raised concerns about the possible spread of the virus.
The United States, India, Italy, South Korea, and Taiwan have responded by requiring virus tests for visitors from China.
Asked whether the Government would consider restrictions for travellers from China, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said it was "under review."
"The Government is looking at that, it’s under review, we noticed obviously what the United States has done and India and I think Italy has looked at it," he said.
“We keep under review all the time, obviously, health threats to the United Kingdom, wherever they may be.
“I think the Department of Transport will take medical advice, talk to the Department of Health and they’ll come to some decisions depending on what we see coming out of China, but at the moment it’s under review.”
It comes as former health minister Lord Bethell urges the Government to introduce Covid tests for visitors from China.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Lord Bethell praised Italy’s “sensible” approach of quarantining those who test positive on arrival.
"This strategy would allow results to be trusted and for genomic testing to be carried out to understand whether any new variants are emerging, he said.
“I think there are two different reasons to bring in testing – one is the American approach which is pre-testing to slow the spread. That is a difficult thing to do because containing a virus like Covid is like trying to stop the sea.
“But what the Italians are doing is post-flight surveillance of arrivals in Italy in order to understand whether there are any emerging variants and… the impact of the virus on the Italian health system.”
“That is a sensible thing to do and something the British Government should be seriously looking at.”
Health minister Will Quince said the “key threat” will be whether there is any new Covid variant from China and said, “there’s no evidence at this point” of one.
However, screening travellers from China for Covid is unlikely to prevent new variants from reaching the UK, the chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has said.
Professor Andrew Pollard told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “Trying to ban a virus by adjusting what we do with travel has already been shown not to work very well. We have seen that with the bans on travel from various countries during the pandemic.
“The important thing is that we have surveillance that when a virus is spreading within our population here in the UK or Europe we are able to pick that up and predict what might happen with the health systems and particularly the more vulnerable in the population.”
Prof Pollard said that any new variant which did appear in China was likely to be best adapted to spreading in the Chinese population.
“The immunity in the (Chinese) population currently relates to vaccines that have been given in the population over the last couple of years and are different to the vaccines we have had and they have not had the extra immunity from having waves Covid,” he said.
“So it is very difficult at this moment to tell whether a variant emerging in China is likely to have any impact here in the UK anyway.
“Testing people travelling from China probably doesn’t really answer the question about whether any new variant that is detected is going to be a problem here.”
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