Travel recovery, safety concerns as China reopens borders

After three years of self-imposed isolation, China yesterday, lifted pandemic restrictions on foreign travels with high expectations of international travel recovery amid fresh concerns on safety.

The International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) latest traffic data showed that the air travel recovery continued through November 2022, with restriction in China the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

However, the arrival of international flights from Mainland China has reactivated COVID-19 travel protocols in Europe and over 20 countries over a fresh wave of infections in China.

For nearly three years, stringent border controls had ring-fenced China from the rest of the world and placed a heavy burden on families and businesses with ties to the mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and abroad.

The first passengers to arrive under the new rules landed at airports in the southern cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen just after midnight on Sunday, according to the state-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN).

The 387 passengers on board flights from Singapore and Canada’s Toronto were not subject to COVID-19 tests on arrival and did not have to undergo five days of quarantine at centralised government facilities, it reported.

In its latest air traffic estimate released yesterday, IATA estimated that globally traffic is now at 75.3 per cent of November 2019 levels. International traffic rose 85.2 per cent versus November 2021.

IATA’s Director General, Willie Walsh, noted that traffic results in November reinforce that consumers are thoroughly enjoying the freedom to travel.

“Unfortunately, the (negative) reactions to China’s reopening of international travel in January remind us that many governments are still playing science politics when it comes to COVID-19 and travel.

“Epidemiologists, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and others have said that the reintroduction of testing for travellers from China can do little to contain a virus that is already present around the world. And China’s objections to these policy measures are compromised by their own pre-departure testing requirements for people travelling to China,” he said.

Walsh urged governments to focus on using available tools to manage COVID-19 effectively—including improved therapeutics and vaccinations—“rather than repeating policies that have failed time and again over the last three years.”

For international travel into China, Beijing has yet to green-light foreign tourists, and inbound travelers will be required to show a negative COVID-19 test result obtained within 48 hours of departure.

Earlier, the EU had recommended that all passengers on flights to and from China should wear face masks, that EU governments introduce random testing of passengers arriving from China and that they test and sequence wastewater in airports with international flights and planes arriving from China.

Besides the EU, over 16 countries have made pre-boarding COVID-19 testing mandatory for passengers coming from China.