Editorial: UN health agency pushing for more data from China on outbreak

Dr Ashley Bloomfield is now a knight. Photo / Marty Melville

The New Year’s honour for Dr, now Sir, Ashley Bloomfield as recognition of his leading role in New Zealand’s pandemic response came with an accidental sense of timing.

As the country’s top health official before stepping down last July, he was a logical choice for the honours roll anyway.

But right now Covid-19 concern around the world has spiked because of the huge Omicron wave in China. Several countries have responded by reinstituting health checks for travellers from China. Beijing is allowing its travel restrictions to fully ease from next weekend.

In this environment, it’s easy to think of the former director general of health with his calm tones and unflappable manner at Beehive press conferences for much of the pandemic.

Were he still outlining the Covid situation to the watching public, the Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit would be mentioning the World Health Organisation’s approach to China’s outbreak.

The WHO wants greater transparency from China and the types of data we’re all familiar with from outbreaks here and in other countries. The United Nations body is due to hold a technical advisory group meeting with Chinese officials today.

One of the reasons why countries such as the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Israel, South Korea, India and Japan have imposed testing or other measures for travellers from China is because of doubts over Beijing’s official data.

On Sunday Australia and Canada became the latest countries to bring in testing rules and New Zealand was expected to follow suit.

Epidemiologist Professor Adrian Esterman of the University of South Australia, said earlier last weekend that requiring a negative test is “primarily a political decision, not a public health one”. He said: “Someone suggested that we would be better off testing the wastewater from planes coming from China, which would be a sensible solution.“

Unofficially thousands of people are reportedly dying of Omicron in China’s cities but that’s not reflected in official data. Less testing is being done there. Expects predict another wave will occur when people travel within China from cities to rural areas for the lunar new year holidays late this month.

The WHO says sharing of data is necessary so that the risk can be adequately assessed. The agency wants more genetic sequencing information, and Covid numbers on hospitalisations, people in intensive care, deaths and vaccinations.

Government and health officials outside of China don’t want extra pressure on their health systems and are wary about new variants of Covid. Variants have emerged previously in countries such as the UK, India, Brazil and South Africa.

The European Union’s disease prevention agency says extra measures are not needed because Europe has widespread immunity and the Covid strains in China are from the Omicron variant.

Professor Andrew Pollard, of the UK committee on vaccination and immunisation, told the BBC: “Trying to ban a virus by adjusting what we do with travel has already been shown not to work very well ... The important thing is we have surveillance that when a virus is spreading ... we are able to pick that up and predict what might happen with the health systems.”

Temporary sample testing of travellers from China by some countries could be useful for genomic analysis to track new variants in the absence of the type of transparency the WHO is after from China.