Belgium to Test Wastewater on Airliners From China to Independently Track China’s COVID-19 Claims

Belgium to Test Wastewater on Airliners From China to Independently Track China’s COVID-19 Claims
A Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane delivered to Air China during a ceremony at Boeing Zhoushan 737 Completion and Delivery Center in Zhoushan, in China's eastern Zhejiang Province, on Dec. 15, 2018. STR/AFP via Getty Images
Updated:
0:00
Belgium will test wastewater from planes arriving from China for new COVID variants as part of new steps to monitor the virus as infections in China surge, the government announced on Monday.

“This will be an additional monitoring objective to verify that the data we receive from China is accurate,” Steven Van Gucht of the Sciensano national public health institute told Reuters.

He said Belgium was aware that some COVID-infected passengers might not use the toilet during their flights, and therefore the new measure was “not meant to track people but to track independently what is happening in China.”
Belgium is also asking travelers from China to test themselves for COVID-19 if they show symptoms seven days after arriving, but will not enforce this measure.

At a press conference announcing the new measures, Belgian Health minister Frank Vandenbroucke said that a European Union-wide policy was needed for China’s COVID surge.

EU health officials will hold talks on Wednesday on a coordinated response.

Authorities around the world are imposing or considering curbs on travelers from China, including mandatory testing for COVID, as infections there spread following Beijing’s relaxation of “zero-COVID” rules.

Pandemic Spreading in China

According to the U.N.’s World Health Organisation (WHO), China started seeing elevated cases of COVID-19 long before it lifted its harsh zero-COVID restrictions in the first week of December.

Beijing has also dismissed any criticism of its COVID-19 statistics, while downplaying the risk presented by new variants, saying that it expects any mutations to be more infectious but less severe.

The CCP’s control and censorship of information has made it hard to verify the extent and nature of reports of a more severe strain, given the range of responses to the virus between patients.

The Chinese people and health officials from different countries are grappling again with the ongoing lack of transparency about COVID-19 in China, particularly given the impossibly low COVID-19 infection numbers and death tolls in official reports.

As of Dec. 23, 2022, India reported 530,690 COVID-19 deaths to the WHO, while China has reported only 31,585 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

In December, residents in many Chinese cities reported overflowing morgues and a health care infrastructure bursting at the seams.
British-based health analytics firm Airfinity said that according to its modeling on Dec. 29, as many as 25,000 people may die from COVID-19 a day at China’s expected COVID-19 peak on Jan. 23, around China’s Lunar New Year.

In December, Chinese people were posting to social media reports of COVID-19 patients suffering symptoms similar to the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain, which many feared was unlike the milder symptoms associated with Omicron strains.

The regime has pushed back on the claims, saying that its monitoring has identified prominent strains of the outbreak to be Omicron. Meanwhile, it has not shared any sequencing data with the international community, leaving observers unable to verify Beijing’s claims.

WHO Meets With China

The WHO on Dec. 30 met with China’s health officials and asked them to share details and real-time developments on the COVID outbreak that is wreaking havoc across the country.
WHO leader on health emergencies Mike Ryan also made a point on Dec. 14 to note during a briefing on global health issues that the explosion of cases in China “is not due to the lifting of COVID restrictions.”

“There’s a little narrative at the moment that in some way, China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden, the disease is out of control. The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease, and I believe that the Chinese authorities have decided strategically that that for them is not the best option anymore.”

However, the CCP has now adopted the approach at the other extreme of the policy spectrum, completely lifting restrictions and unleashing the virus into a population that had endured three years of mandatory testing and centralized quarantine at great social and economic cost.

Without the CCP sharing sequencing data as COVID-19 spreads and claims more lives in China, governments are now implementing their own initiatives to monitor for emerging variants—particularly ahead of Jan. 8, the date from which Beijing will lift its long-standing travel restrictions and allow residents to travel internationally again.

Previously under its zero-COVID policy, Chinese authorities were not issuing passports. Now, as a severe COVID wave spreads throughout the country, the CCP is choosing to lift its prior restrictions to allow Chinese to travel around the world, as well as visitors to reenter China.

Many countries, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Italy, have imposed new testing rules on travelers from China ahead of Jan. 8.

Morocco became the first country to ban all travelers from China on Dec. 31. When the virus first emerged in 2019, the United States led the way in banning travel from China.
Reuters contributed to this report.