World Scrambles on China COVID-19 Travel Policies

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, where we’re looking at international responses to COVID-19 and China’s reopening, criticism of Israel’s national security minister, and a link between climate change and domestic violence.

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China has criticized other countries’ COVID-19 travel restrictions, calling them “excessive,” after several countries said they would require negative COVID-19 tests from Chinese travelers.

“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” said Mao Ning, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson. “We are firmly opposed to attempts to manipulate the COVID measures for political purposes and will take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity.”

The comments come as countries around the world grapple with how to handle China’s reopening and reversal on its zero-COVID approach. China is reopening, but low vaccination rates and concerns regarding the effectiveness of China’s COVID-19 vaccines—combined with an outbreak of COVID-19 cases in the country—have led some countries to require Chinese travelers to have a negative COVID-19 test.

This week, Canada and Australia announced that they would be requiring such tests. France did the same and encouraged the European Union as a whole to do so too. The United States also recently imposed a requirement. Countries vary in their approaches. Some, like the United States, say a negative test will be required to fly into the United States from China. Italy and Japan, by comparison, will require passengers arriving from China to test on arrival.

The United Kingdom, which said it is still working out the details of its policy, also said Tuesday that those who tested positive for COVID-19 on arrival would not be required to quarantine. British Transport Secretary Mark Harper said, “What we are doing is we are collecting that information for surveillance purposes.” Harper was critical of COVID-19 restrictions during the pandemic.

“This is about a country, China, which isn’t sharing the health data with the global health system that we expect everybody to do,” Harper added. “That is why we have put this temporary precautionary measure in place as China opens up its borders.” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson said the country is attempting to strike the appropriate balance between acknowledging the fact that an estimated 1 in 45 people in the United Kingdom are currently infected with COVID-19 and the potential of new variants.

Palestinians lambast Israeli national security minister. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new national security minister, visited a holy site in Jerusalem on Tuesday, attracting criticism from more than one corner. Ben-Gvir went to Temple Mount, which is also the site of the al-Aqsa mosque, becoming the first Jewish minister to do so in five years. The Palestinian Authority called the visit to the third-holiest site in Islam an “unprecedented provocation,” and Jordan summoned its Israeli ambassador for a reprimand over Ben-Gvir’s visit.

Ben-Gvir was also censured by Israeli Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef. “As a minister representing the government of Israel you should be acting according to Chief Rabbinate instructions, which have long forbidden visiting the Temple Mount,” Yosef wrote in a letter to the national security minister. Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism, and it is the position of the chief rabbinate that the site is “too holy for Jews to set foot on.”

Domestic violence connected to climate change. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified a link in its 2022 report that tied climate change (specifically extreme weather, which climate change makes more common) and domestic violence. The report pointed to increasing evidence that extreme weather events drive domestic violence, meaning that climate change is, in addition to an environmental and economic issue, a matter of gender equality.

Terry McGovern, who leads the department of population and family health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told the Washington Post that the connection between climate change and domestic violence as “overwhelming.”

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