UK ‘set to announce China arrivals must have negative Covid test’ amid spike

PASSENGERS arriving in the UK from China will soon need a negative Covid test before travelling.

Ministers had been facing pressure to test arrivals at the border to contain any new mutations after a surge in infections.

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And now the UK Government is expected to announce that people arriving from China will need to test before travelling.

Ministers had said the situation was being kept under review as Beijing announced plans to start reissuing passports and visas for overseas trips.

The US, Italy, India, South Korea and Japan have all imposed curbs after the end of Beijing’s aggressive zero-Covid policy saw cases of the bug surge.

On one flight from China to Italy more than half of all passengers were found to have Covid.

Some Tory MPs had called for a more robust response from the Government, even as the chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, Professor Andrew Pollard, said the imposition of travel restrictions was unlikely to stop variants reaching the UK.

He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “Trying to ban a virus by adjusting what we do with travel has already been shown not to work very well.

“We have seen that with the bans on travel from various countries during the pandemic.”

He added: “Testing people travelling from China probably doesn’t really answer the question about whether any new variant that is detected is going to be a problem here.”