Most airlines now require cabin crew to wear additional PPE for working on flights to and from China
For countries like USA, Italy, France and UK, cabin crew and passengers arriving or connecting flights from mainland China will now need to show negative COVID-19 pre-departure test.
Airlines and their airport staff will be responsible for checking all passengers from China have negative pre-departure tests, and passengers and crew will not be allowed to board the flight without evidence of a negative test result.
The good news for cabin crew is that the above requirement does not apply to them if they only transited through an airport in China, Hong Kong or Macau. However, if there are delays and the transit time exceeds 24 hours, then the cabin crew are no longer exempt.
This applies from Jan 5th 2023. Air passengers and crew will also be required to complete an attestation form
Most countries in the Far East still require passengers and crew to upload their vaccination status before they go onboard the aircraft or they will not be allowed to board the aircraft.
The number of COVID-19 cases has reached a record high in Mainland China. The variants circulating in China are already circulating in the EU, and as such are not challenging for the immune response of EU/EEA citizens. In addition, EU/EEA citizens have relatively high immunisation and vaccination levels.
Given higher population immunity in the EU/EEA, as well as the prior emergence and subsequent replacement of variants currently circulating in China by other Omicron sub-lineages in the EU/EEA, a surge in cases in China is not expected to impact the COVID-19 epidemiological situation in the EU/EEA.
The rise in covid cases is made worse in China, as China has effectively stopped counting covid cases and deaths, and abandoned mass testing and adopting new criteria for counting deaths and excluding some fatalities from being reported.
The Chinese National Health Commission’s official daily briefing, which had offered detailed if uninformative statistics every day since February 2020, has not been published since 24 December.
Anxious to avoid announcing high case numbers, from early in the pandemic China reported only symptomatic cases, contrary to World Health Organization recommendations and most countries’ practice. The government eventually relented to international criticism and began reporting asymptomatic cases. But last month, even before it stopped giving daily briefings, China adopted a new and unique definition of covid death that appears designed to keep mortality numbers low.
Countries now impose border tests.
Advice to all readers: If you have not been vaccinated with the MRNA vaccines, your chances of getting a serious illness is very high, now with Chinese nationals travelling across the world.
Models point to a predicted 3.7 million new cases by 13th Jan (source: the BMJ - UK).
For those vaccinated, the omicron is less virulent than previous virus.
People in China vaccinated with SinoVac (the Chinese vaccine) are three times more likely to get severe disease than those vaccinated with mRNA vaccines. This also applies to anyone who is unvaccinated.
Source credit: BMJ - UK
