Shubham Chandra knows how dangerous the coronavirus can be: He lost his dad during the pandemic. So when he cleared customs at Newark Liberty International Airport and saw people offering anonymous COVID-19 testing, he was happy to volunteer.
“It’s a minimum amount of effort to help a lot of people,” said the 27-year-old New York City man, who had just stepped off a plane from Cancun, Mexico.
The airport testing is part of the government’s early warning system for detecting new variants, which began expanding recently in the wake of a COVID-19 surge in China.
With the addition of Los Angeles and Seattle, there are now seven airports where arriving passengers can volunteer for COVID-19 tests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program now covers about 500 flights from at least 30 countries, including more than half from China and surrounding areas.
As of Thursday, the CDC is also requiring travelers to the U.S. from China, Hong Kong and Macao to take a COVID-19 test no more than two days before travel and provide a negative result before boarding a flight.
And down the road, some scientists are calling for wider use of an additional strategy: screening wastewater from toilet tanks on arriving airplanes.
“Without surveillance, it’s very hard to know what’s going on,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University. “Hopefully, with more sampling, we will get more information about what’s circulating.”
Some scientists are worried the COVID-19 surge in China could unleash a new coronavirus mutant on the world, since every infection is another chance for the virus to change. There’s no sign of a new variant from China at this point. But one reason for new testing requirements, according to the CDC, is a lack of adequate and transparent information from China on viral strains infecting people there.
“We have very little control over what happens elsewhere,” said epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, a consultant to the CDC. “What we can control is what’s happening in the United States.”
The airport program is based on an unfortunate reality: “Travelers … go across the globe quickly and they can get and spread infectious diseases really fast,” said Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of CDC’s travelers’ health branch.
Friedman said the program is a partnership with two companies that take care of the testing and lab work — XpresCheck and Concentric by Ginkgo. A pilot program was expanded around the time the first omicron variant emerged in the U.S. more than a year ago. Besides Newark, Seattle and Los Angeles, the program includes New York’s Kennedy, Washington’s Dulles and airports in Atlanta and San Francisco.
The latest expansion of the traveler surveillance program aims to capture more flights from China. But on Wednesday in Newark, some of the targeted planes arrived from Mexico, France and Belgium. After clearing customs, travelers could stop at a table, swab their noses and fill out a form. Chandra said it took about a minute.
Like other travelers, he won’t get the results. But he tests for COVID-19 when he flies to Ohio every other month to see his mom, he said, since “the last thing I want to do is bring (the virus) home to her.”
About 10% of people on targeted flights volunteer. Their samples are pooled and PCR tested. Positive ones are genetically sequenced. Volunteers get free home COVID-19 tests.
Over time, Friedman expects the program to grow and potentially go global. It’s already shown it can spot coronavirus variants early — detecting omicron variants BA.2 and BA.3 and reporting them to a global database weeks before others did.
But Jetelina said a surveillance program at seven airports is “just not that big” so trying to spot variants might be like “looking for a needle in the haystack.”
To aid the search, experts suggest taking more samples from airplane bathrooms.
“It’s a little gross when you start thinking about it,” Jetelina said. “But these are really long flights and we would expect the majority of people would go to the bathroom.”
The CDC, which monitors wastewater in municipal systems, ran a pilot program last summer testing airplane wastewater at Kennedy airport. Friedman said the agency is working to expand this type of surveillance.
Such testing has been used elsewhere. A study last year in the journal Environment International looked at wastewater testing from 37 flights chartered to bring Australians home earlier in the pandemic, concluding that the practice “can provide an additional and effective tool” for monitoring the virus coming into a country. Recently, Canada announced an expanded wastewater pilot program and Belgium said it would test wastewater from airplanes coming from China.
As surveillance continues, scientists believe that the omicron variant BF.7, which is extremely adept at evading immunity, is driving China’s current surge. CDC data shows BF.7 is already in the U.S., and currently accounts for about 2% of COVID-19 cases. The most prevalent mutant in the U.S. is XBB.1.5, another variant responsible for 41% of U.S. cases. Ray said this one attaches more tightly than its competitors to a receptor that allows viruses to enter a cell.
Scientists said the virus will surely keep evolving — which is why they need to keep searching for new variants. The coronavirus is like a predator stalking humanity, Ray said, and “the predator adapts to the prey.”
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Ungar reported from Louisville, Kentucky.
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Patients, most of them elderly, are lying on stretchers in hallways and taking oxygen while sitting in wheelchairs as COVID-19 surges in China’s capital Beijing.
The Chuiyangliu hospital in the city’s east was packed with newly arrived patients on Thursday. By midmorning beds had run out, even as ambulances continued to bring those in need.
Hard-pressed nurses and doctors rushed to take information and triage the most urgent cases.
The surge in severely ill people needing hospital care follows China abandonment of its most severe pandemic restrictions last month after nearly three years of lockdowns, travels bans and school closures that weighed heavily on the economy and prompted street protests not seen since the late 1980s.
It also comes as the the European Union on Wednesday “strongly encouraged” its member states to impose pre-departure COVID-19 testing of passengers from China.
Over the past week, EU nations have reacted with a variety of restrictions toward travelers from China, disregarding an earlier commitment to act in unity.
Italy — where the pandemic first exacted a heavy toll in Europe in early 2020 — was the first EU member to require coronavirus tests for airline passengers coming from China, but France and Spain quickly followed with their own measures. That followed the imposition by the U.S. of a requirement that all passengers from China show a negative test result obtained in the previous 48 hours before departure.
China has warned of “countermeasures” if such policies were to be imposed across the bloc.
China has sought to get more of its elderly population vaccinated, but those efforts have been hampered by past scandals involving fake medications and previous warnings about adverse reactions to the vaccines among older people.
China’s domestically developed vaccines are also considered less effective than the mRNA jabs used elsewhere.
The head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday the agency is “concerned about the risk to life in China” amid the coronavirus’ explosive spread across the country and the lack of outbreak data from the Chinese government.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency recently met with Chinese officials to underline the importance of sharing more details about COVID-19 issues including hospitalization rates and genetic sequences, even as the pandemic continues to recede globally since it began in late 2019.
“Data remains essential for WHO to carry out regular, rapid and robust risk assessments of the global situation,” Tedros said at a press briefing.
Tedros said he understood why numerous countries have recently taken measures against travelers coming from China, saying “it’s understandable that some countries are taking steps to prevent their citizens” given the void of information about COVID-19.
WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said the testing protocols implemented by some countries were not a restriction against travel.
“It’s not an excessive measure based on individual countries’ risk assessment,” Ryan said.
He noted that for the past three years, China has had some of the world’s harshest rules regarding COVID-19. “The reality for China is that many countries (now feel) they don’t have enough information to base their risk assessment,” he said.
Earlier this week, Chinese officials sharply criticized COVID-19 testing requirements imposed on visitors from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved, which include the U.S. and several European nations.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing Tuesday.
The WHO’s Ryan added that there were continuing concerns about how Chinese officials are recording coronavirus deaths, saying that their definition, which only counts COVID-19 deaths if there is a record of respiratory failure, is too narrow.
Throughout December, China recorded only 13 official COVID-19 deaths, despite many thousands of cases every day and reports about overwhelmed hospitals, fever clinics and crematoriums.
A WHO expert group said Wednesday that no worrying new COVID variants have been identified in China based on the information authorities have shared, including genetic sequences deposited into a public database. The WHO said Chinese scientists have now shared more than 770 sequences, with omicron subvariants BA.5 and its descendants accounting for more than 97% of all local infections. Globally, BA.5 variants comprise about 68% of all sequences.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said it did not expect the surge of COVID-19 in China to affect the outbreak in Europe, given the high rates of vaccination across the continent. It also noted that the variants spreading in China were already present in Europe, suggesting that any spillover from China would have a negligible impact.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, said the agency was currently evaluating the significance of the variant known as XBB.1.5, which has recently comprised an increasing proportion of cases in the U.S.
“Our concern is how transmissible it is,” Van Kerkhove said. “The more this virus circulates, the more chances it will have to change,” she said, adding that further waves of transmission do not necessarily have to translate into more deaths, with the wide availability of vaccination and drugs.
Van Kerkhove said there is no data yet to prove that XBB.1.5 causes more severe disease, but that the WHO is working on a new risk assessment of the variant that it expects to release soon.
European Union nations are fine-tuning a coordinated response to China’s COVID-19 crisis on Wednesday and are zeroing in on travel restrictions that would upset both Beijing and the global airline industry.
China has already vehemently rejected travel restrictions that some EU nations have started to impose and has warned of “countermeasures” if such actions should be expanded in coming days.
Yet on Wednesday, EU Commission spokesman Tim McPhie said that the “overwhelming majority of countries are in favor of” imposing testing of passengers from China prior to departure. The EU nations were seeking an official stance on the issue later in the day.
The Chinese government and European health experts have said there is no pressing need for any blanket restrictions on travel since the coronavirus variants emerging from China are already prevalent in Europe.
On Wednesday the International Air Transport Association, which represents some 300 airlines worldwide, lent its powerful voice to the protests.
“It is extremely disappointing to see this knee-jerk reinstatement of measures that have proven ineffective over the last three years,” said IATA Director General Willie Walsh.
“Research undertaken around the arrival of the omicron variant concluded that putting barriers in the way of travel made no difference to the peak spread of infections. At most, restrictions delayed that peak by a few days,” Walsh said.
After threatening countermeasures on Tuesday, Chinese government spokesperson Mao Ning said Wednesday that “we sincerely hope that all parties will focus on fighting the epidemic itself, avoid the politicization of COVID.”
Still, the EU seems bent on taking some sort of joint action to ensure incoming passengers from China do not transmit any potential new variants to the continent. Sweden, which holds the EU presidency, said in a statement that “travelers from China need to be prepared for decisions being taken at short notice.”
Fearful of being caught unawares like at the outset of the global pandemic in early 2020, the EU Integrated Political Crisis Response group is now slated to make a decision later Wednesday.
As well as pre-departure testing, EU nations are likely to agree on special testing of wastewater in planes coming from China to see if it contains dangerous variants that are not common on the continent yet.
Over the past week, EU nations have reacted with a chaotic cascade of national measures to the crisis in China, disregarding an earlier commitment to act in unity before anything else.
Italy was the first EU member to require coronavirus tests for airline passengers coming from China, but France and Spain quickly followed with their own measures.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking a new COVID-19 subvariant that is spreading rapidly across the country.
XBB 1.5 is a subvariant of the omicron variant. The CDC said it is now estimated to account for about 40% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. as of Dec. 31, according to the agency’s data tracker.
Dr. Barbara Mahon, director of the CDC’s proposed Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, told CBS News that the agency expects the strain to dominate the Northeast as it spreads across the country.
It’s not exactly known where the subvariant came from, except that it is a recombinant of previous subvariants that seems to bind better to cells, allowing for greater spread.
“There’s no suggestion at this point that XBB.1.5 is more severe. But I think it is a really good time for people to do the things that we have been saying for quite a while are the best ways to protect themselves,” Mahon told CBS News.
The CDC’s COVID-19 Data Tracker shows XBB 1.5 accounts for an estimated 19% of cases in the southeastern United States. However, it accounts for over 70% of the cases in the Northeast. Puerto Rico is also seeing higher cases linked to XBB 1.5 as well.
France and Spain will implement tougher COVID-19 measures for passengers arriving from China, authorities said Friday.
France’s government is requiring negative tests, and is urging French citizens to avoid nonessential travel to China. France is also reintroducing mask requirements on flights from China to France.
French health authorities will carry out random PCR tests at airports on passengers arriving from China to identify potential new coronavirus variants.
France and Spain said they would continue to push for a Europe-wide policy.
France’s hospitals have struggled in recent weeks with a large number of patients because of three concurrent outbreaks: the seasonal flu, a wave of bronchitis cases and COVID-19.
Earlier, Spain’s government said it would require all air passengers coming from China to have negative tests or proof of vaccination.
Health Minister Carolina Darías told reporters that Spain would be pushing for similar measures at a European level following the surge in cases in China. She said coronavirus health controls would be stepped up at Spanish airports.
Darías didn’t specify when the new requirement would take effect.
Spain made the announcement after Italy said it would require coronavirus tests for airline passengers from China. Health officials from the 27-member European Union on Thursday promised to continue talks on seeking a common approach but held back from imposing restrictions.
“There exists a shared concern internationally and nationally over the evolution of cases in China and the difficulty to make a correct evaluation of the COVID-19 situation given the scant information that we have available,” Darías said.
Darías noted that China would be lifting travel restrictions from Jan. 8 and there was likely to be a major increase in people traveling abroad. She said the chief concern was the possible emergence of new coronavirus variants and it was important to act fast.
The United States announced new COVID-19 testing requirements Wednesday for travelers from China, joining some Asian nations that had imposed restrictions. Japan on Friday started requiring tests for passengers arriving from China.
