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The hospitals are overcrowded, like here in Beijing: China is struggling with a massive corona wave
Photo: Andy Wong / dpa
After almost three years of lockdowns, mass tests and forced quarantine, China has ended its restrictive corona policy - the consequences of the resulting high number of infections are also being discussed internationally.
The vast majority of EU countries support corona tests before leaving China for the EU – according to the EU Commission, representatives of the national health ministries had already agreed on Tuesday in principle on a “coordinated approach”.
In the afternoon, the EU states will discuss how to deal with people entering China.
Stöhr: “Then the variant has already slipped through”
Despite the massive corona wave in China, the epidemiologist Klaus Stöhr does not consider testing travelers from the People's Republic to be expedient in order to prevent the spread of new virus variants.
"The monitoring is not such a bad idea, scientifically certainly interesting, but in practice you would have to see how this variant behaves in the population," said the former head of the influenza program of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Deutschlandfunk.
It is about which properties have changed in addition to the genetic ones, whether other age groups are also affected or whether the immune protection is undermined.
»All of this takes a certain amount of time and then the variant has already slipped through.
Even testing can't prevent that," said Stöhr.
The tests would not identify every infected person.
The bioinformatician Richard Neher made a similar statement to SPIEGEL:
a test obligation will not prevent the entry of a new variant.
"And with the currently high number of cases with strong variants worldwide, that probably doesn't play a major role anyway." According to him, a program for anonymous voluntary tests at airports with sequencing of the samples would make more sense.
"That way we could get an overview of the virus variants circulating in all parts of the world," he said.
Montgomery for Europe-wide PCR test requirement
The chairman of the board of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, has spoken out in favor of a Europe-wide test requirement for all travelers from China.
“We don't know what's happening in China right now.
The infections are completely uncontrolled," said Montgomery of the Düsseldorf "Rheinische Post".
He therefore thinks it makes sense to make a PCR test mandatory on entry.
In addition, sequencing must take place for those who have tested positive in order to be able to identify variants that have not yet been registered in Germany.
"It cannot be ruled out that new variants from China will find their way to Germany," stressed Montgomery.
While Italy and Spain have introduced a test requirement for travelers from China, Germany does not have one.
At the end of December, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach spoke out against this – however, he wanted to prepare close-meshed “variant monitoring” at European airports.
The Greens health expert Janosch Dahmen was also critical of mandatory testing.
Dahmen said in the ARD morning show that checking individual direct flights from China would be "little effective" since most of the travel from China comes into the country via other routes, for example with a stopover in other countries.
In any case, from his point of view, mandatory testing would only make sense “jointly at European level”.
However, the situation must be closely monitored.
ani/dpa/AFP
