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[...]Italy on Thursday urged the rest of the European Union to follow its lead and test travellers from China for COVID, but others said they saw no need to do so for now or were waiting for a common stance across the largely border-less bloc.
The EU's health officials could not agree on one course of action when they held talks in the morning and said they would continue their talks later.
[...]
Autran, who advises the government on epidemiological risks, told Radio Classique that for now the situation was under control and that there were no signs of worrying new COVID variants in China.
Germany and Portugal have also said they saw no need for new travel restrictions, while Austria has stressed the economic benefits of Chinese tourists' return to Europe.
Norway, which is not an EU member but is part of the bloc's border-free deal, was taking a similar approach.
"We likely have several hundred thousand people getting COVID in Norway every week now," Professor Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health wrote on Twitter. "A few hundred extra cases among travelers from China would be a drop in the ocean."
[...]
originally posted by: 38181
a reply to: 727Sky
How do we know that those infected aren’t carrying another strain that we aren’t testing for, and just assumed it’s Covid?
Italy finds no new COVID variants among Chinese visitors so far
ROME — There is no sign of new COVID-19 variants so far among passengers arriving in Italy from China in recent days, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said, as she called for a new, EU-wide testing regime to guard against the threat from a resurgent coronavirus.
On Wednesday, Italy became the first European country to introduce mandatory virus testing for people arriving from China. Beijing's decision to lift lockdown policies earlier this month triggered a surge in cases, spurring concerns around the world that a dangerous new variant could emerge.
At a press conference in Rome on Thursday, Meloni said genomic sequencing of positive cases arriving in Milan’s airports since last week had shown only the Omicron variant.
originally posted by: JAGStorm
originally posted by: 38181
a reply to: 727Sky
How do we know that those infected aren’t carrying another strain that we aren’t testing for, and just assumed it’s Covid?
How do we know Americans, or Europeans don’t have another strain?
there were no signs of worrying new COVID variants in China.
originally posted by: nugget1
there were no signs of worrying new COVID variants in China.
I'm worried about the original strain.
Viruses mutate to weaker strains as they run through the populous, and China didn't allow that to happen with their no covid policy.. How do we know this isn't still the original strain? PCR tests don't identify specific strains; that takes time in a lab.
We were told that the original strain could infect someone for up to two weeks before a PCR test gave a positive result, and that anybody infected was able to infect others during that two week period. That's why we had lockdowns social distancing.
This whole situation stinks as bad as any rotten fish I've ever smelled, and they won't even be able to blame it on Trump this time.
Furness also said that we should be concerned about our current rapid tests if viral load—how much virus is being produced—should decrease with new variants. If that happens, it could be a problem for at-home tests.
“Another issue is syncytia—the ability of a virus to cause an infected cell to fuse directly with another cell rather than bursting and sending out free virions,” Furness said. “This is done to evade the immune system and it could also make tests less sensitive.”
The research out of Emory University published in Cell didn’t just look at current variants; it also measured how mutations in the N protein could affect at-home tests’ accuracy and ability to recognize the virus.