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Italy requires travellers from China to test for COVID

Italy has ordered COVID-19 antigen swabs as well as virus sequencing for all travellers arriving from China, where cases are ballooning, according to the Italy health minister said on Wednesday.

Being the first nation in Europe to be hit hard by the virus in February 2020 after it spilt over from China, Italy is now the first to impose mandatory tests on people arriving from the Asian country struggling with a new wave.

Testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai at Milan’s main airport, Malpensa, commenced on Monday and the results showed almost one in two passengers was infected.

“The measure is essential to ensure surveillance and detection of possible variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population”, Minister Orazio Schillaci said, announcing mandatory testing for all passengers.

The minister did not specify the measures that would be imposed on travellers testing positive. However, the local health chiefs in the Lombardy region around Milan and the Lazio region around Rome said they would have to quarantine in buildings set aside by the local health authorities.

On Wednesday, Chinese hospitals and funeral homes found themselves hard-pressed as its COVID-19 wave brought resources to a thin trickle. The scale of the outbreak and doubts over official data prompted some countries to consider new travel requirements on Chinese arrivals.

Japan has announced that as of December 31 it will demand a negative COVID-19 test upon arrival for travellers from mainland China, whereas Taiwan will test arrivals from China from January 1.

The ratio of passengers who tested positive on the first flight to Malpensa exceeded 50 percent with 35 being infected with COVID out of 62 travellers from China, according to Lombardy’s health chief Guido Bertolaso’s Wednesday statement. Another 62 were positive out of 120, he added.

He went on to say that virus sequencing procedures had been activated to analyse variants, and the results are expected on Thursday.

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