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Thomas Aeschi demands that travelers from China must have a corona test when entering Switzerland.
Sophie ReinhardtEditor Politics
“We mustn’t make the same mistake we made three years ago,” says SVP faction leader Thomas Aeschi (43). It is therefore now necessary for travelers from China to have a corona test upon entry in order to protect the Swiss population from possible mutations. Aeschi Blick thus confirms a report from Radio 1.
The President of the Commissions for Social Security and Health in the National Council wants to submit the relevant application to the Directorate of Health Minister Alain Berset (50) next week.
The Geneva Health Director Mauro Poggia (63) had already spoken out in favor of compulsory testing for people entering from China. This is against the background that Air China will resume flights between Beijing and Geneva from January 26, 2023.
Swiss well protected
For once, SVPer Aeschi wants to see the rules of some EU countries in Switzerland as quickly as possible. Starting this week, Italy, France and Spain will require travelers from China to show a negative PCR test that is no more than two days old upon arrival. In some cases, they should be tested again directly on arrival.
Countries such as Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, on the other hand, see no reason to impose stricter entry rules. “At the moment it cannot be assumed that the current infection process in China will pose an increased risk to the Swiss health system, since omicron variants have also been circulating here for some time,” said a spokesman for the Swiss Health Directors’ Conference on request. Therefore, no entry regulations for travelers from China are currently planned.
In addition, mainly omicron subvariants circulated in China, including the new variant BF.7. “There is no evidence that this variant leads to a more severe course of the disease than the previous omicron variants,” the health directors’ conference said. The vast majority of people in Switzerland have been vaccinated, have had an infection or both and therefore have a high level of protection against a severe course of Covid 19 disease.
Lauterbach sees no urgency
The German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (59) also said that stricter rules were “not necessary yet”. According to him, Germany is preparing a system for “variant monitoring” at airports in conjunction with other European countries. For the time being, Belgium also wants to limit itself to examining wastewater from aircraft toilets for any virus variants.
After almost three years of mass tests, closed borders, travel bans and lockdowns, the Chinese state and party leadership surprisingly announced the end of the zero-Covid policy on December 7th. Since then, the virus has spread rapidly among the 1.4 billion people in China.
It is estimated that hundreds of millions of people have already been infected with Corona, and tens of thousands have died as a result of Covid disease. There is no reliable data on this because the authorities have stopped publishing epidemiological data.
EU confers on Wednesday
In view of the corona wave in China, a large part of the EU states support corona tests for travelers from the People’s Republic, according to the European Commission. “The overwhelming majority of countries are in favor of pre-departure tests,” said a spokesman for the Brussels authority on Tuesday after a meeting of representatives of national health ministries. Basically, they want to agree on a “coordinated approach”. The discussion about uniform entry rules is to be continued on Wednesday at a meeting of the EU states at expert level.
The government in Beijing has already spoken out against strict entry regulations from other countries for travelers from the People’s Republic. These rules are “discriminatory,” said a spokeswoman.