New Zealand will not require travellers from China to be tested for Covid-19, the government has announced.<\/p>\n
The government this afternoon said imposing entry restrictions on travellers from China was not “required or justified”.<\/p>\n
Covid-19 Response Minister Ayesha Verrall said there was minimal public health risk to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
“Officials have done a public health risk assessment, including working through scenarios of potential case numbers among travellers from China. This confirmed these visitors won’t contribute significantly to our Covid case numbers meaning entry restrictions aren’t required or justified,” she said.<\/p>\n
The Covid-19 variant in China should not require new measures such as mandatory testing to protect New Zealanders, the Minister added.<\/p>\n
“There is minimal public health risk to New Zealand. We know that BF7 is the prevalent variant in China and that it hasn’t caused significant outbreaks in other countries that, like New Zealand, have already been exposed to the BA5 variant. So public health measures are not required to protect New Zealanders.”<\/p>\n
Verrall said scientists from the Institute of Environmental Science and Research would begin a programme to test waste water from international flights to detect the virus.<\/p>\n
She said this would be put in place in the “coming weeks”.<\/p>\n
Scientists would then assess whether that should replace the random, voluntary testing of travellers from China she outlined today.<\/p>\n
Verrall said that would involve “emailing a random sample of people recently arrived from China to ask them to undertake a RAT test and share that information with health authorities. It’s entirely voluntary and we have had high uptake from international visitors when we used this method before.”<\/p>\n
The Chinese government has rejected claims it has deliberately underreported the total number of fatalities. It said decisions by other countries to restrict travel from China\u00a0were politically motivated<\/a>.<\/p>\n A\u00a0number of countries<\/a>\u00a0including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada have already introduced pre-departure testing for travellers from China.<\/p>\n