Por Sally Bronston – NBC News
The United States government plans to waive the requirement for negative COVID-19 tests imposed earlier this year on travelers from China, a source familiar with the as-yet-unannounced decision told NBC News on Tuesday.
Plans to remove the health requirement, initially reported by The Washington Post, they would annul the measure adopted by the United States on January 5which has required all travelers from China to present a negative coronavirus test before their trip.
[La FDA autoriza la primera prueba en el hogar para COVID-19 e influenza]
The measure, which was imposed on all passengers over the age of 2, was adopted in response to the dramatic increment in cases of coronavirus in the Asian country, after the Chinese communist government lifted its strict sanitary measures adopted at the beginning of the pandemic.
NBC News has contacted the Chinese embassy in Washington for comment on the plan, which comes amid tensions between the two countries after an alleged Chinese spy balloon flew over US territory and was shot down by authorities.
The incident led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a trip to Beijing. His visit would have been the first by a senior US diplomat since that of former Secretary of the Donald Trump Administration, Mike Pompeo, in 2018.
China eased measures to contain COVID at the end of December, after weeks of protests across the country in rejection of the restrictions that for three years limited the activities of the population in many aspects of their daily lives.
This change triggered infections in the Asian country, which motivated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, for its acronym in English) to announce the new rule that required all passengers coming from China, Hong Kong and Macao to present a negative COVID-19 test two days before their trip to the United States.
[El Departamento de Energía evalúa la posibilidad de que el COVID-19 se haya filtrado de un laboratorio en Wuhan]
On January 14, the Chinese authorities reported nearly 60,000 virus-linked deaths since early December, and indicated that the “peak of the emergency” had already passed. But two days later, the British health analysis company Airfinity presented a starker picture projecting that the death toll had not yet peaked and would reach 36,000 by January 26.
Chinese authorities then reported 3,278 virus-related deaths between January 27 and February 2. China has been accused of not being transparent with the figures and not reporting all deaths.
