Wellingtonn: The New Zealand Government is reiterating its advice to all international travellers to do a COVID-19 test if they become symptomatic after arrival.
The government is also stepping up awareness of free rapid antigent tests (RATs) available at airports.
"This follows growing global concerns, including from the World Health Organisation (WHO) about lack of reliable data on case numbers in China and their work to address this," COVID-19 Response Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said in a media release on Wednesday.
"In response, officials have done a public health risk assessment including working through scenarios of potential case numbers among travellers from China. This confirmed these visitors won’t contribute significantly to our Covid case numbers meaning entry restrictions aren’t required or justified," Verall added.
According to the minister, there is minimal public health risk to New Zealand.
"We know that BF7 is the prevalent variant in China and that it hasn’t caused significant outbreaks in other countries that, like New Zealand, have already been exposed to the BA5 variant. So public health measures are not required to protect New Zealanders," Verall added.
"However we do share the WHO’s concerns about lack of information sharing and this is why we will be asking travellers arriving from China to help us gather more information. In coming weeks we will temporarily be emailing a random sample of people recently arrived from China to ask them to undertake a RAT test and share that information with health authorities. It’s entirely voluntary and we have had high uptake from international visitors when we used this method before," Verall explained.
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