Australia will not immediately follow countries such as the United States, Italy and Japan which have moved to require travellers from China to produce a negative Covid test to enter.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, on Thursday backed health advice that said Australia has built up immunity to the variant ravaging China, but he did not rule out travel restrictions in future.
Covid has been spreading rapidly throughout China since Beijing begun rolling back its strict “zero-Covid” policies. Several countries have announced border restrictions for arrivals from China, which will end its quarantine requirement for inbound travellers on 8 January.
Italy became the first country in Europe to require people arriving from China to be tested. Authorities had already been monitoring swab tests at Rome’s Fiumicino airport and Milan’s Malpensa airport, where on Monday one in two passengers arriving from China who undertook non-mandatory tests were found to be positive for coronavirus.
Since then, the US announced that from 5 January it will also require all travellers from China to provide a negative Covid test to before boarding a flight. Japan, India, South Korea and Taiwan have also announced test requirements for entry.
However, Australian authorities have held off introducing similar rules.
On Thursday the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, said for now he was comfortable not introducing negative test requirements for arrivals from China because the main variant authorities believed was circulating in that country had already spread throughout Australia in July.
“The biggest issue in China that we need to watch is the emergence of other variants, and at this stage that hasn’t happened,” Kelly told ABC radio.
“The information we have out of China, at least at the moment, is the variant that’s circulating mostly and driving the rising cases in China is a variant that we’ve already seen in Australia… and it’s mostly started to become less of a problem here.
“It’s a dynamic situation. We certainly need to watch closely what’s happening in China and that’s what we’re doing.”
He said China has a “very under-immune” population because of the zero-case policy pursued since the beginning of the pandemic. “This was always eventually going to happen that when they did move to a similar response to the rest of the world that they would be faced with a very largely non-immune population.”
Kelly added that the “soup of variants” that spread in Australia throughout 2022 had contributed to a “high hybrid immunity”, and said that high vaccination rates and the availability of antiviral treatments and testing capability meant “we’re actually very well protected from the severe issues of Covid”.
Albanese backed Kelly’s advice but left the door open to future border restrictions.
“We are always open to following the health advice which is what we do with travel to various countries,” Albanese told Channel 9.
Albanese later told ABC TV: “What we will do is take health advice, not just when it comes to China, when it comes to every country.
“What is occurring in some parts of the world as well is that people have to get tested before they get on a plane as well. So, there are various methods.
“We will examine the advice which is there. But we will always do what we can to keep Australians safe. We know that Covid is still impacting right around the world and of course here in Australia as well.” he said.
Prof Robert Booy, infectious diseases paediatrician and head of the clinical research team at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, said that while he agrees with Kelly that Australia has built up levels of immunity to the variant spreading through China, “we don’t know what is around the corner”.
He said that because there were “huge numbers of people getting infected in China every day”, there is an increased risk that a productive mutation – which can evade immunity – will emerge.
Booy said it would take time to detect a new subvariant or variant in China and then to understand if it posed a greater risk of evading immunity, had greater transmissibility, or led to more severe illness, and by the time new travel restrictions could be introduced, the new variant could have already entered Australia.
“Once a new variant gets in it would be hard to stop.”
Booy said the government should consider “practical steps” now that would help protect Australia should a new variant emerge. He called for rapid antigen testing to be done at departure gates of flights to Australia, and for those testing positive to be stopped from boarding. He also said it made sense to make masks mandatory on flights arriving from China.
“Every man and his dog and every woman and her cat have had Covid in Australia and now they’re getting it in China, so finding the simplest way of detecting Covid on the day of embarkation may be practical given the risk of a new subvariant or even a new variant.”
“So if everyone is getting to the airport three or four hours ahead of their flight anyway, it takes three or four minutes to do a RAT. If we wait it will be too late.” More broadly, Booy said any passengers that are displaying clear symptoms of a respiratory illness should be stopped from boarding flights from China to Australia.
Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida and Paul Karp
