The European Union should consider immediately scaling up genomic sequencing of Covid-19 infections and monitoring of waste water, including from airports, to detect any new variants given the virus surge in China, the bloc's health chief said.
In a letter to health ministers of the EU's 27 members, Stella Kyriakides said the bloc should be "very vigilant" as China lifted travel restrictions on 8 January as reliable epidemiological and testing data for China were quite scarce.
She advised ministers in the letter, which was seen by Reuters, to assess their current practices on genomic sequencing of the coronavirus "as an immediate step".
If sequencing had been scaled down, countries might want to consider scaling it back up, she wrote, adding that it was important to continue or start surveillance of waste water, including sewage from key airports.
If a new variant appeared, the bloc needed to detect it early to be able to react quickly, the commissioner wrote.
The commissioner's letter, dated 29 December, followed an online meeting of over 100 representatives from EU members, EU health agencies and the World Health Organization to discuss how to deal with the outbreak in China.
Health experts are expected to hold a crisis response meeting next week, according to an EU source.
Italy has urged the rest of the European Union to follow its lead and test travellers from China, but most EU members have said they saw no need to do so.
Ms Kyriakides said some EU members had proposed measures such as the random testing of travellers.
Spain said it would join other countries setting new restrictions by requiring travellers from China to test negative or show they have been fully vaccinated.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says it does not currently recommend measures on travellers from China.
It said the variants circulating in China were already in the European Union, EU citizens had relatively high vaccination levels and the potential imported infections were low compared to the number of daily infections in the EU, with health care systems currently coping.
France is set to reduce from next week its capacity to carry out sequencing of Covid-19 infections, France Inter radio reported.
From tomorrow, six out of the eight sequencing platforms that have been conducting Covid surveillance for the French Health Ministry would stop doing so, France Inter said.
The Health Ministry told France Inter that the monitoring process would be lightened but that sequencing would still be carried out by a network of labs in France.
Earlier, immunologist and member of Ireland's Covid-19 Advisory Group Dr Anne Moore has that testing passengers coming into Ireland from China is not going "to give us much benefit because Covid is already very prevalent here, however testing wastewater from planes arriving from China into the EU will tell us through genomic surveillance how different any variants are that are coming from China and therefore give us a very quick and fast ability to respond to any new variants that might be introduced to the EU."
The senior lecturer in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at University College Cork said other countries should follow the United States in testing the wastewater of planes to detect the virus.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, she said: "It is a really good idea, we can get a heads up if there are different variants coming in from China, we don't know what is really circulating in China at the moment and it is really important that we figure that out as soon as possible".
