Italy urges EU peers to test China arrivals for COVID, but many say 'no'

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. This was not the first time EU countries were split on COVID policies. At the start of the pandemic there was much debate on what to do, and heated competition to buy safety equipment, before member states pulled together and successfully placed - and shared - joint vaccine orders. Italy "expects and hopes" that the EU will impose mandatory COVID tests for all passengers flying in from China like Rome did, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told a news conference. The scale of the outbreak in China and doubts over official data have prompted countries including the United States and Japan to impose new travel rules on Chinese visitors as Beijing lifted its restrictions. In the EU, so far only Italy has ordered COVID-19 antigen swabs for all travellers coming from China. This risks not being effective if others in the bloc, where people travel freely from one country to another, will not do the same, Meloni said. The main airport in the Italian city of Milan started testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai on Dec. 26 and found that almost half of them were infected. But earlier on Thursday, Brigitte Autran, head of the French health risk assessment committee COVARS, said: "From a scientific point of view, there is no reason at this stage to bring back controls at the borders."<br/>