A third-party arbitrator on May 31 ordered local nurses’ union SEIU Local 121RN to pay the fine to cover the costs of replacement workers during nurses’ 10-day strike over staffing and safety gear shortages just six months into the coronavirus pandemic in June 2020.

It’s the second half of a May 2023 decision by the arbitrator, who then ruled that nurses with SEIU Local 121RN – which represents 9,000 nurses and healthcare workers in Southern California – did not follow due process as stated in its contract before the strike, the hospital said in a news release.

The hospital also argued that because nurses voiced concerns over personal protective gear, the reasons for the strike were not covered in its contract.

In a June 13 news release, Jackie Van Blaricum, president of HCA Healthcare’s Far West Division, and the hospital’s CEO during the strike, said the union showed “reckless disregard” for the community by calling the strike.

However, the union’s executive director, Rosanna Mendez, maintains the union was not in violation of its contract with the hospital and plans to “take all measures available to get the decision overturned.”

She said the union entered discussion about staffing shortages with the hospital and reached a staffing agreement in May 2019, which ran through May 2020.

The union attempted to extend the agreement in May 2020 before it expired, but the hospital denied attempts to negotiate an extension, Mendez said, and the union issued a strike notice soon after.

She also defended nurses’ call for more personal protective gear during the strike.

In a 2020 news release from the union, several nurses described hectic conditions in the hospital during the pandemic.

Some said they didn’t get breaks for up to eight hours, while others said they were sometimes required to stay with patients for five to seven hours at a time, leaving dozens of other patients unattended. Additionally, a nurse said many of her colleagues contracted COVID-19 due to lack of safety measures, and two staff members died.

“In the middle of a global pandemic, nurses were experiencing daily trauma,” Mendez said. “To expect that nurses weren’t going to talk about personal protective equipment is outrageous.”

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PHOENIX (AP) — By the time Aaliyah Ibarra started second grade, her family had moved five times in four years in search of stable housing. As she was about to start a new school, her mother, Bridget Ibarra, saw how much it was affecting her education.

At 8 years old, her daughter did not know the alphabet.

“She was in second grade and couldn’t tell me any of the letters. I would point them out and she didn’t know,” Bridget Ibarra said. “She would sing the song in order, but as soon as I mixed them up, she had no idea.”

“I just didn’t know what letters were which,” says Aaliyah, now 9. “I know them now.”

The family’s struggles coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic that forced Aaliyah to begin her school experience online. Unfamiliar with a computer, Aaliyah was regularly kicked out of the virtual classroom, her mother said. Teachers complained she was not looking at the screen and took too many breaks.

Zoom school was especially difficult for Aaliyah because she was homeless — and like thousands of students nationally, her school didn’t know.

Homeless students often fell through the cracks during the tumult of the pandemic, when many schools struggled to keep track of families with unstable housing. Not being identified as homeless meant students lost out on eligibility for crucial support such as transportation, free uniforms, laundry services and other help.

Years later, the effects have cascaded. As students nationwide have struggled to make up for missed learning, educators have lost critical time identifying who needs the most help. Schools are offering tutoring and counseling but now have limited time to spend federal pandemic relief money for homeless students, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national homelessness organization.

“There is urgency because of the losses that have occurred over the pandemic — loss in learning, the gaps in attendance and the health crisis,” she said. Many education leaders, Duffield said, don’t even know about federal money earmarked for homeless students — and the programs expire next year.

The number of children identified as homeless by schools nationwide dropped by 21% from the 2018-2019 school year to the 2020-2021 school year, according to federal data. But the decrease, representing more than 288,000 students, likely includes many kids whose homelessness was unknown to schools. Federal counts of homeless people living on the street or in shelters also appeared to decrease in 2021 due to pandemic disruptions, but by 2022, those numbers shot up to the highest in a decade.

In Bridget Ibarra’s case, she chose not to tell the school her kids were homeless — and she says teachers, disconnected from students by a screen, never asked. She was worried if officials knew the family was staying in a shelter, and the school was obliged by law to provide transportation, the family would face pressure to enroll in a different school that was closer.

She knew how hard the disruptions were on her kids.

“I know they didn’t enjoy moving as often as we did. They would say things like, ‘We’re moving again? We just moved!’” Ibarra said.

“When I moved, I missed my friends and my teacher,” Aaliyah said.

The stigma and fear associated with homelessness also can lead families not to tell anyone they lack secure housing, Duffield said.

“If we don’t identify children proactively, we can’t ensure that they have everything they need to be successful in school and even go to school,” she said.

Before the pandemic, Ibarra and her two children moved in with her brother in Phoenix because she was having trouble making ends meet. Then her brother died unexpectedly. At the time, Ibarra was pregnant with her third child and couldn’t afford the rent with what she earned working at a fast-food restaurant.

The family spent the next six months at Maggie’s Place, a shelter in North Phoenix that caters to pregnant women. The four of them, including Aaliyah’s infant brother, moved next to Homeward Bound, an apartment-like shelter for families, where they were living when the pandemic hit a few months before Aaliyah started kindergarten.

Aaliyah’s school, David Crockett Elementary, stuck with online learning her entire kindergarten year. Aaliyah and her older brother, joined by several other children, spent most of their school days on computers in a mixed-grade makeshift classroom at the shelter.

“It was like she wasn’t even in school,” Ibarra said.

While the shelter helped the family meet their basic needs, Ibarra said she asked the school repeatedly for extra academic help for her daughter. She blamed the struggles partly on online learning, but she also felt the school was giving all their attention to Aaliyah’s older brother because he already was designated as a special education student with an individualized education program, or IEP.

The principal, Sean Hannafin, said school officials met frequently with the children’s mom. He said they offered the support they had available, but it was hard to determine online which students had needs that required intervention.

“The best thing we could do was take that data and flag them for when we returned in person, because you need a certain amount of time to observe a child in a classroom,” he said. “The online setting is not the place to observe.”

A federal law aimed at ensuring homeless students have equal access to education provides rights and services to children without a “fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.”

Many students aren’t identified as homeless when their parents or guardians enroll them. At school, teachers, cafeteria staff, aides or bus drivers often notice other students whose well-being may need looking into. Students may have unwashed clothes, or many late arrivals or absences.

But with children learning online, teachers and staff often didn’t see those things.

Overall, the drop in the student homelessness count began before the pandemic, but it was much steeper in the first full school year after COVID-19 hit. The percentage of enrolled students identified as homeless in the U.S. dropped from 2.7% in 2018-2019 to 2.2% in 2020-2021.

Over that timeframe, Arizona had one of the biggest drops in the number of students identified as homeless, from about 21,000 to nearly 14,000. But there were signs many families were in distress. KateLynn Dean, who works at Homeward Bound, said the shelter saw huge numbers of families dealing with homelessness for the first time during the pandemic.

Eventually, Bridget Ibarra had to enroll Aaliyah in a different school.

After getting kicked out of low-income housing last year when their property owner sold the building, the family lived with Ibarra’s mother before finding another low-income unit in Chandler, more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Phoenix.

Once the family moved, enrolling in school was far from easy. Aaliyah missed the first three weeks of the school year last fall because of delays obtaining transcripts, and Ibarra insisted she not start the year without a plan to address her delays in reading and writing. Aaliyah spent that time playing and sitting around the house.

“Honestly, Aaliyah said she didn’t care how long, because she didn’t want to go to that school anyway,” her mother said. She said Aaliyah missed her friends and was tired of moving.

At Aaliyah’s new school, Frye Elementary, Principal Alexis Cruz Freeman saw for herself how hard it was to keep in touch with families when children were not in classrooms. Several students disappeared altogether. But she said families have started re-engaging with school. The state of Arizona reported more than 22,000 students were identified as homeless in the last school year — twice as many as the year before.

Ibarra said she tried to shield as much discomfort about their living situation from her kids as possible. It worked. Aaliyah doesn’t remember much about the places they’ve stayed except the people that surrounded her family.

Aaliyah has gained ground academically at her new school, Cruz Freeman said. She still has trouble pronouncing and recognizing some words. But by the end of the school year, she was able to read a text and write four sentences based on its meaning. She is also performing at grade level in math.

The principal considers her a success story in part because of her mother’s support.

“She was an advocate for her children, which is all that we can ever ask for,” Cruz Freeman said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The homicide rate for older U.S. teenagers rose to its highest point in nearly 25 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the suicide rate for adults in their early 20s was the worst in more than 50 years, government researchers said Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report examined the homicide and suicide rates among 10- to 24-year-olds from 2001 to 2021.

The increase is alarming and “reflects a mental health crisis among young people and a need for a number of policy changes,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher who studies U.S. death trends and wasn’t involved in the CDC report.

Experts cited several possible reasons for the increases, including higher rates of depression, limited availability of mental health services and the number of guns in U.S. homes.

Guns were used in 54% of suicides and 93% of homicides among the age group in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

“Picture a teenager sitting in their bedroom feeling desperate and making a decision, impulsively, to take their own life,” Woolf said. If they have access to a gun, “it’s game over.”

Suicide and homicide were the second and third leading causes of death for 10- to 24-year-olds, after a category of accidental deaths that includes motor vehicle crashes, falls, drownings and overdoses. Other researchers have grouped the data by the method of death, and concluded that guns are now the biggest killer of U.S. children.

Earlier this year, Woolf and other researchers looking at CDC data noted dramatic increases in child and adolescent death rates overall at the beginning of the pandemic, and found suicide and homicide were important factors.

The report also found:

—Suicide and homicide death rates remained far higher for older teenagers and young adults than they were for 10- to 14-year-olds.

—In 2021, there were about 2,900 suicides in youths ages 10 to 19, and 4,200 in 20- to 24-year-olds. About 3,000 homicide deaths were reported in the younger group, and nearly 3,900 in the adults in their early 20s.

—The homicide death rate jumped from 8.9 deaths per 100,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2019 to 12.3 in 2020. It rose to 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021, the highest since 1997, according to CDC data.

—Homicide deaths became more common than suicide deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds, while suicide was more common in the younger and older age groups.

—While large increases were seen in homicide rates for young Black and Hispanic people in the U.S., there were not significant increases for their white counterparts, other CDC data shows.

—Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the homicide death rate jumped 34% from 2019 to 2020 — from 13.4 per 100,000 population to 18 per 100,000. It held stable in 2021, but the suicide rate rose enough in 2021 — to 19.4 per 100,000 — to surpass the homicide rate.

Suicide death rates in children and teens were rising before COVID-19, but they jumped up at the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said the reasons may be hard to pinpoint, but that isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns could be a factor.

“There is a misperception that if you talk to young people about depression, they’ll get depressed. A don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy for depression is not effective,” Trivedi said. “The earlier we can identify the ones who need help, the better chance we’ll have at saving lives.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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THE CORONAVIRUS FILES

Looking back, and forward, after three pandemic years

The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic in March 2020, and several news outlets noted the anniversary last week. 

Laurel Wamsley at NPR recalled how Dr. Anthony Fauci told an unmasked Congress that things would get worse. The bull stock market plummeted into bear territory. Then-President Donald Trump banned travel from Europe, and actor Tom Hanks and basketball player Rudy Gobert tested positive, leading the former to isolate in Australia and the NBA to cancel a game, then the entire season.

If some — or much — of that sounds unfamiliar, you’re not alone. 

“Over time, many details will probably fade because of the quirks and limitations of how much our brains can remember,” writes Richard Sima at The Washington Post. “It was difficult for our brains to encode the overload of information we had to sift through — masks, social distancing, superspreaders, more cases, more deaths, new waves and new variants such as omicron and delta, and who even remembers all the subvariants?”

Yet such collective forgetting means society risks not preparing for future pandemics. 

“Many aspects of how to best respond to a novel virus remain unsettled or fiercely debated,” writes The New York Times, introducing a series of opinion essays arguing the merits of closing schools, banning international travel, and mandating masks or vaccines.

In a recent YouGov poll, conducted in January 2023, about two-thirds of Americans said they remain concerned about the threat of future pandemics, and most would like the U.S. government to invest more in pandemic preparedness.

Part of that preparedness should involve a bipartisan “post-mortem” analysis of the U.S. pandemic response, to identify where mistakes were made and learn from them, argue veterinarian Leslie Bienen and infectious disease expert Margery Smelkinson in Time. 

The pandemic also did long-term damage to the health care system that requires urgent action, writes Dr. Atul Gawande, a global health administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, in The New York Times. 

Scientists have learned a lot in the past three years, writes Stephanie Pappas at Scientific American. New mRNA-based vaccines, face masks, ventilation, viral genomic surveillance and wastewater tracking all proved useful weapons against COVID-19.

Yet plenty of questions remain. “There are so many things that I — you know, my team would love to know about COVID, particularly how a person might develop long COVID and how we can prevent that,” Yale immunologist Akiko Iwasaki told Sacha Pfeiffer at NPR’s Morning Edition. 

It’s not even clear how to define long COVID, what causes it, and how many people have it, notes Dylan Scott at Vox. 

Then there’s the $64,000 question: Is the pandemic over? The U.S. winter wave was much smaller than in the preceding two years, notes Mary Kekatos at ABC News. 

“A combination of more immunity, better treatments, less severe infections and more people following mitigation measures likely played a role,” Kekatos writes.

Yet COVID is still killing more than 300 people per day in the U.S.

And a new variant or outbreak could easily worsen the situation, Kekatos warns.

There’s no one organization that calls the end of a pandemic, writes Jennifer Alsever at Fast Company. Scientific, social, and political factors are all at play.

Americans are nearly evenly split on whether COVID has passed the pandemic stage, according to a March Gallup poll. 

“It’s over when people decide it’s over and return to normal patterns of living,” said John M. Barry, author of a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic. “Which we seem to have done.”

New analysis points to animal origin for COVID

Coronavirus genetic material was closely associated with that from raccoon dogs being sold at the Wuhan wet market in 2019, scientists asserted last week, providing the “strongest evidence yet” that the virus emerged from the illegal wildlife trade, Katherine J. Wu was the first to report at The Atlantic. 

The evidence comes from swabs taken in the market in January 2020, after the outbreak began and the animals were removed. 

The sequencing data from these samples, briefly posted to an international database and noticed by scientists before they were taken down again, do not confirm that raccoon dogs were infected, nor prove they passed the virus to people. 

But researchers said the finding “was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal,” writes Benjamin Mueller at The New York Times. 

Wu explains, “Think of it as finding the DNA of an investigation’s main suspect at the scene of the crime.” 

Last week, the House of Representatives voted unanimously to declassify intelligence about the origins of the coronavirus, including information related to activities and any illnesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The legislation was already approved by the Senate, but President Joe Biden has not yet decided if he’ll sign it, reports Lisa Mascaro at AP News.

Black children and babies bore brunt of COVID

A new study highlights racial inequities among children during the pandemic, when Black children were hospitalized and died at more than twice the rate of white children.

“Children with COVID-19 in communities of color were sicker, hospitalized and died at higher rates than white children,” said Sandra Harris-Hooker of the Morehouse School of Medicine, one of the historically Black organizations that participated in the study commissioned by the Black Coalition Against COVID.

Misinformation and mistrust about COVID safety protocols and vaccines played key roles in the disparities, reports Donovan J. Thomas at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The report also pointed to the effects of social factors such as poverty and housing insecurity that rose for Black and Latino families during the pandemic.

Children of color have also been subject to higher rates of and long-term symptoms, more likely to lose a primary caregiver, and suffered deep learning gaps.

Another new study reports that sudden unexpected infant deaths rose among non-Hispanic Black babies during the first pandemic year, to nearly triple the rate among non-Hispanic white babies in 2020.

The deaths, reported by a CDC team in the journal Pediatrics, included sudden infant death syndrome as well as accidental suffocation and other unknown causes. 

The authors characterized the findings as preliminary, and said they weren’t sure what factors were behind the changes. 

But a commentary in the journal by other physicians pointed to a variety of possible causes, including poverty, lack of access to health care and less education about safe sleep practices and breastfeeding. 

They also noted that during the pandemic, resources such as doctors’ offices and programs that support families cut back on in-person care, which may have limited support to Black families.

“If you don’t have a safe place for your baby to sleep, how are you going to have them sleep safely?” commentary author Dr. Rebecca Carlin, a pediatrician with Columbia University, pointed out to Erika Edwards at NBC News.

Pandemic likely contributed to spike in maternal death rates

Experts blame COVID-19 infections and physician burnout for a 40% rise in maternal mortality in the U.S. in 2021, reports Mike Stobbs at AP News.

More than 1,200 women died during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth in 2021, according to new CDC data. 

Pregnant people infected with COVID have a seven times higher risk of death than uninfected pregnant people, reports Akilah Johnson at The Washington Post. 

“It didn’t help that vaccination rates among pregnant women were disappointingly low in 2021 — particularly among Black women,” Stobbs adds. 

Maternal mortality among Black women was more than double that of white women in 2021.

The CDC did not issue a complete recommendation for pregnant women to get vaccinated until August of that year.

Maternal mortality rates fell in 2022, and while the data aren’t fully in, they are likely to come closer to pre-COVID levels.

FDA supports Paxlovid for adults, booster for young children

An FDA committee voted 16-1 in support of full, non-emergency approval of the antiviral medication Paxlovid on Thursday.

The agency and its advisors agreed the drug’s benefits for adults with mild to moderate COVID, and who are at high risk for severe disease, outweigh the medication’s risks.

The FDA is expected to complete its analysis in May, reports Janelle Chavez at CNN Health.

More than 8 million people in the U.S. have received the drug since its emergency authorization in December 2021.

“Besides oxygen, Paxlovid has probably been the single most important tool in this epidemic,” said Dr. Richard Murphy, a member of the FDA committee.

The FDA, in a report leading up to the committee vote, concluded that Paxlovid does not specifically promote COVID rebound, in which a person tests positive, negative, then positive again. 

People who took placebo medication in clinical trials also experienced rebound, according to the agency. It characterized rebound as part of the natural course of some infections.

The FDA also granted emergency authorization to a fourth dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for children younger than 5, reports Kristina Fiore at MedPage Today. 

Children who received the Pfizer primary series — three shots of the original-formula, monovalent vaccine for ages from 6 months to four years — are now eligible for a booster with the newer, bivalent formula.

The new authorization reflects data on the immune responses of 60 children who received three monovalent shots before a bivalent booster.

Meanwhile, STAT’s Helen Branswell wonders about boosters for adults who haven’t had a COVID shot since fall. 

Some nations, including Canada and the U.K., already have plans to offer spring boosters to people at high risk of severe illness. This would aim to counter waning immunity.

Some experts say people who are older or immunocompromised deserve another booster.

“But in the United States, there’s been radio silence from the Food and Drug Administration,” writes Branswell.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s coronavirus emergency officially ended Tuesday, nearly three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order and just days after the state reached the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths related to the virus.

As California’s emergency winds down, such declarations continue in just five other states — including Texas and Illinois — signaling an end to the expanded legal powers of governors to suspend laws in response to the once mysterious disease. President Joe Biden announced last month the federal government will end its own version May 11.

Newsom on Tuesday signed a proclamation officially ending the state of emergency, declaring “the conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property … no longer exist.”

The end of California’s order will have little to no effect on most people as Newsom already lifted most of the state’s restrictions, like those that required masks, closed beaches and forced many businesses to close. It offers a symbolic marker of the end of a period that once drastically altered the lives of the state’s nearly 40 million residents.

Illinois’ order will end in May alongside the federal order, while the governors of Rhode Island and Delaware recently extended their coronavirus emergency declarations. In New Mexico, public health officials are weighing whether to extend a COVID-19 health emergency beyond its Friday expiration date.

Texas, meanwhile, hasn’t had any major coronavirus restrictions for years, but Republican Gov. Greg Abbott keeps extending his state’s emergency declaration because it gives him the power to stop some of the states’ more liberal cities from imposing their own restrictions, like requiring masks or vaccines. Abbott has said he’ll keep the emergency order — and his expanded powers — in place until the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passes a law to prevent local governments from imposing virus restrictions on their own.

The conflicting styles show that, while the emergencies may be ending, the political divide is not — foreshadowing years of competing narratives of the pandemic from two potential presidential candidates in Newsom and Abbott.

Newsom has used his authority to make sure all of California’s local governments had restrictions in place during the pandemic, even threatening to cut funding to some cities that refused to enforce them. While California’s emergency declaration is ending, other local emergencies will remain in place — including in Los Angeles County, home to nearly 10 million people.

The Los Angeles emergency order encourages mask use in some public places like business and trains and for residents who have been exposed to the virus. It will remain in effect for another month. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to end the order March 31.

Many public health experts say it makes sense that California’s order is coming to a close.

“Three years ago, if you … got infected you were rolling the dice about dying,” said Brad Pollock, chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “What’s happened in the three years now is we have vaccines, we have antiviral therapy, we have much more knowledge about how we take care of patients in terms of supportive care. Your risk of dying is a fraction of what it was.”

The Newsom administration’s approach was to issue broad restrictions on what people could do and where they could go. California ended up faring better than other states, but they did worse than some other countries, like Sweden, said Jeffrey Klausner, professor of clinical population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

“I think if we had better focused our resources on those most at risk, we probably could have avoided more deaths,” he said.

The pandemic strained California’s health care system, which has yet to fully recover, said Carmela Coyle, president and CEO of the California Hospital Association. She said hospitals remain overwhelmed — not from COVID patients, but from an influx of people returning to the health care system after staying away during the pandemic. She said a majority of California’s hospitals are losing money, prompting fears some could close — just as a community hospital in the state’s Central Valley did in December.

“While the state’s COVID public health emergency is formally concluding, the health care system emergency remains,” Coyle said.

Health care workers have felt the strain, too, working long hours among people infected with a highly contagious and potentially life-threatening disease. The strain has prompted a workforce shortage, with competing proposals to remedy it. The California Hospital Association is asking for a one-time infusion of $1.5 billion to help keep hospitals afloat. Labor unions, meanwhile, are backing a bill that would impose a $25 minimum wage for health care workers.

Meanwhile, local public health departments worry the end of the coronavirus emergency will mean a return to limited funding for their budgets, an issue exposed in the early days of the pandemic when many counties did not have enough people to respond to the crisis. Newsom signed a budget last year that will spend $200 million to help public health departments hire more workers. This year, he’s proposing cutting nearly $50 million in public health workforce training programs, part of his plan to cover a projected budget deficit.

“Public health is dependent on their frontline workforce, and that frontline workforce has to be skilled and trained and educated,” said Michelle Gibbons, president of the County Health Executives Association of California.

Overall, Newsom’s budget proposal would sustain $300 million in public health spending, including $100 million for 404 new positions in the state Department of Public Health, including areas of workforce training and emergency preparedness and response. The money will “modernize state and local public health infrastructure and transition to a resilient public health system,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for the California Department of Finance.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A crucial question has eluded governments and health agencies around the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began: Did the virus originate in animals or leak from a Chinese lab?

Now, the U.S. Department of Energy has assessed with “low confidence” in that it began with a lab leak, according to a person familiar with the report who wasn’t authorized to discuss it. The report has not been made public.

But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree.

“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”

The DOE’s conclusion was first reported over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, which said the classified report was based on new intelligence and noted in an update to a 2021 document. The DOE oversees a national network of labs.

White House officials on Monday declined to confirm press reports about the assessment.

In 2021, officials released an intelligence report summary that said four members of the U.S. intelligence community believed with low confidence that the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human, and a fifth believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab.

While some scientists are open to the lab-leak theory, others continue to believe the virus came from animals, mutated, and jumped into people — as has happened in the past with viruses. Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.

CALLS FOR MORE INVESTIGATION

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the report. All 18 offices of the U.S. intelligence community had access to the information the DOE used in reaching its assessment.

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, said she isn’t sure what new intelligence the agencies had, but “it’s reasonable to infer” it relates to activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said a 2018 research proposal co-authored by scientists there and their U.S. collaborators “essentially described a blueprint for COVID-like viruses.”

“Less than two years later, such a virus was causing an outbreak in the city,” she said.

The Wuhan institute had been studying coronaviruses for years, in part because of widespread concerns — tracing back to SARS — that coronaviruses could be the source of the next pandemic.

No intelligence agency has said they believe the coronavirus that caused COVID-19 was released intentionally. The unclassified 2021 summary was clear on this point, saying: “We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon.”

“Lab accidents happen at a surprising frequency. A lot of people don’t really hear about lab accidents because they’re not talked about publicly,” said Chan, who co-authored a book about the search for COVID-19 origins. Such accidents “underscore a need to make work with highly dangerous pathogens more transparent and more accountable.”

Last year, the World Health Organization recommended a deeper probe into a possible lab accident. Chan said she hopes the latest report sparks more investigation in the United States.

China has called the suggestion that COVID-19 came from a Chinese laboratory “ baseless.”

SUPPORT FOR ANIMAL THEORY

Many scientists believe the animal-to-human theory of the coronavirus remains much more plausible. They theorize it emerged in the wild and jumped from bats to humans, either directly or through another animal.

In a 2021 research paper in the journal Cell, scientists said the COVID-19 virus is the ninth documented coronavirus to infect humans — and all the previous ones originated in animals.

Two studies, published last year by the journal Science, bolstered the animal origin theory. That research found that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was likely the early epicenter. Scientists concluded that the virus likely spilled from animals into people two separate times.

“The scientific literature contains essentially nothing but original research articles that support a natural origin of this virus pandemic,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who has extensively studied COVID-19′s origins.

He said the fact that others in the intelligence community looked at the same information as the DOE and “it apparently didn’t move the needle speaks volumes.” He said he takes such intelligence assessments with a grain of salt because he doesn’t think the people making them “have the scientific expertise … to really understand the most important evidence that they need to understand.”

The U.S. should be more transparent and release the new intelligence that apparently swayed the DOE, Worobey said.

REACTION TO THE REPORT

The DOE conclusion comes to light as House Republicans have been using their new majority power to investigate all aspects of the pandemic, including the origin, as well as what they contend were officials’ efforts to conceal the fact that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Earlier this month, Republicans sent letters to Dr. Anthony Fauci, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others as part of their investigative efforts.

The now retired Fauci, who served as the country’s top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has called the GOP criticism nonsense.

Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has asked the Biden administration to provide Congress with “a full and thorough” briefing on the report and the evidence behind it.

Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, emphasized that President Joe Biden believes it’s important to know what happened “so we can better prevent future pandemics” but that such research “must be done in a safe and secure manner and as transparent as possible to the rest of the world.”

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By Amber Dance

Dearth of pandemic data on race, ethnicity ‘beyond bad’

When a trio of health equity scholars set out to study racial and ethnic inequities during the pandemic, they failed, the researchers write in STAT. The data just weren’t there.

“Even in 2022, the degree of missing data on race and ethnicity in federal COVID-19 databases was simply too high,” the authors write. “How bad has the problem been? Far beyond bad.”

For example, in a CDC dataset of more than 50 million COVID cases, 34% were missing race and ethnicity information. (In contrast, 99% of cases included age and sex.)

The researchers, stymied by the lack of answers to their original questions, turned to studying the differences in how well states collect the relevant data. They found the lack of race and ethnicity data for those with confirmed COVID cases ranged widely, from 8.7% of cases in Utah to 100% in North Dakota. 

“The pervasive missing-ness of racial and ethnic data amounts to nothing short of data genocide,” write the authors. “This categorical erasure of viral transmission networks, lives lost, and missed vaccination opportunities in data collected from Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous communities represents a dismissal that may reverberate inequities for generations to come.”

There are opportunities to improve, they note. For example, the CDC, as part of its ongoing restructuring, recently announced the creation of an Office of Health Equity and office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, reports Joseph Choi at The Hill.

Biden administration signals end of emergency phase

May 11 marks a big day: Both the national COVID-19 emergency and the public health emergency declarations will expire, the Biden administration has announced. 

The White House’s sudden move comes in response to Republican-led bills that aimed to end the emergencies immediately, reports Zoë Richards at NBC News. House Republicans have also passed a bill to end telework in federal agencies, writes Mychael Schnell at The Hill.

The Biden administration argued that some advance notice was needed to help states wind down assistance programs and avoid “wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system” that a more abrupt change would create.

The change will mean Americans will have to pay their share for COVID-19 tests and treatments, and maybe even vaccines, that have been free.

Starting April 1, states will again be able to remove people from Medicaid if they no longer qualify. Some 13% of enrollees could lose coverage as a result.

Medicare coverage of telehealth will continue through the end of 2024.

The change could also interfere with pandemic data collection, because states would become exempt from sharing case counts and death rates with the CDC, notes Cheyenne Haslett at ABC News.

The end of the emergencies also has other political consequences. It ends the Title 42 policy that has limited entry of migrants at the U.S. border. It could also scuttle the Biden administration’s plans for student loan forgiveness, writes Solcyre Burga at Time.

In addition to these practical considerations, the end of the emergencies sends a powerful message about ongoing risks from the coronavirus, Jennifer Kates, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told The New York Times. “It might let people let their guard down,” she said.

Many have already done that. Fewer than 16% of people have received the latest vaccine, for example, while COVID continues to kill hundreds of Americans every day. 

The World Health Organization still considers the pandemic a public health emergency, but has indicated the crisis is in transition.

“There is no ‘level of disease’ that defines a pandemic or emergency,” notes epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina on her blog. The winter so far has stress-tested the health system with ongoing omicron infections, and thus far, hospitals haven’t been utterly overwhelmed. “Given this,” writes Jetelina, “I agree that we are not in an emergency phase in the U.S.”

But the nation is not yet in an endemic, predictable phase either, she adds. “This will likely take years.”

Experts support additional oversight of pathogen research

The nation’s biosecurity advisors have backed a new set of tighter regulations for studies of pathogens with the potential to harm humans.

However, they raised so many concerns that the new recommendations will likely be modified before they’re finalized as guidelines, reports Sara Reardon at Nature.

In the past, scientists aiming to alter pathogens were subject to extra oversight if their organisms of interest were on a list of “select agents” — such as the coronavirus or the bacterium that causes anthrax. This additional review kicks in if the scientists plan certain categories of concerning research, such as adding drug resistance or changing the species a pathogen could infect.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) unanimously — if hesitantly, on the part of some members — supported new rules that would add to oversight on studies of any pathogen that infects people, animals, or plants at the Jan. 27 meeting. The regulations would apply to work “reasonably anticipated” to generate a pathogen that could create a “severe threat to public health.”

“The recommendation reflects the heightened concern about biosafety and biosecurity catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes Jocelyn Kaiser at Science. “Many virologists worry the new reviews could delay work with relatively benign agents such as cold viruses, herpesviruses, and viruses modified to treat cancer.”

Some board members suggested the new rules might make it more difficult to develop vaccines and treatments for rapidly evolving pathogens, reports Sarah Owermohle at STAT.

Gerald Parker, the chair of NSABB and a biosecurity expert at Texas A&M, said the full review would likely be required for “a very small subset of research.”

It’s not clear when the new rules might be modified and adopted by the National Institutes of Health, which funds much of the nation’s biological research. The NSABB recommended the nation create a special office to help researchers deal with the additional review.

The changes would only apply to studies funded by the U.S. government, though some committee members expressed interest in regulating privately funded research as well. Such a change would likely require Congressional action.

COVID is No. 8 cause of death among children

The coronavirus has leapt over influenza and pneumonia to become the most common infectious disease that kills U.S. children, according to a report in JAMA Pediatrics.

Overall, it’s the eighth most common cause of death in kids. Because child death is rare, the rate was just one death per 100,000 children from August 2021 to July 2022.

“Just because the numbers are so much lower in children does not mean that they’re not impactful,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Infectious Diseases, told Deidre McPhillips at CNN.

However, experts who spoke with the U.K.’s Science Media Centre criticized some of the study’s methods, and noted it doesn’t include data from the latest waves of infectious disease that hit in autumn. “These methodological choices result in an overestimation of rates, and make the claim that COVID is the leading cause of infectious disease deaths in children a misleading one in my view,” said Dr. Michael Absoud of King’s College London.

COVID-19 “caused ‘substantially’ more deaths than any vaccine-preventable disease historically,” notes McPhillips.

As of mid-January, approximately 43% of U.S. children had received at least their first dose of the COVID vaccine; fewer than one in ten have received the updated booster, McPhillips reports.

A recent JAMA Network study of more than 10 million children, ages 5 through 11, who received mRNA COVID vaccines confirmed the shots are safe and effective, reports Kenneth Bender at Contagion Live. Data show the vaccines reduce risk for infection, illness, and long-term complications, and that they pose lower risk for heart inflammation than the coronavirus itself.

“Children are still at risk of serious and rarely fatal infections,” wrote Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in a JAMA Pediatrics editorial. “Given the amount of information currently available to parents, the decision to vaccinate their children should be an easy one.”

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By Amber Dance

Dearth of pandemic data on race, ethnicity ‘beyond bad’

When a trio of health equity scholars set out to study racial and ethnic inequities during the pandemic, they failed, the researchers write in STAT. The data just weren’t there.

“Even in 2022, the degree of missing data on race and ethnicity in federal COVID-19 databases was simply too high,” the authors write. “How bad has the problem been? Far beyond bad.”

For example, in a CDC dataset of more than 50 million COVID cases, 34% were missing race and ethnicity information. (In contrast, 99% of cases included age and sex.)

The researchers, stymied by the lack of answers to their original questions, turned to studying the differences in how well states collect the relevant data. They found the lack of race and ethnicity data for those with confirmed COVID cases ranged widely, from 8.7% of cases in Utah to 100% in North Dakota. 

“The pervasive missing-ness of racial and ethnic data amounts to nothing short of data genocide,” write the authors. “This categorical erasure of viral transmission networks, lives lost, and missed vaccination opportunities in data collected from Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous communities represents a dismissal that may reverberate inequities for generations to come.”

There are opportunities to improve, they note. For example, the CDC, as part of its ongoing restructuring, recently announced the creation of an Office of Health Equity and office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, reports Joseph Choi at The Hill.

Biden administration signals end of emergency phase

May 11 marks a big day: Both the national COVID-19 emergency and the public health emergency declarations will expire, the Biden administration has announced. 

The White House’s sudden move comes in response to Republican-led bills that aimed to end the emergencies immediately, reports Zoë Richards at NBC News. House Republicans have also passed a bill to end telework in federal agencies, writes Mychael Schnell at The Hill.

The Biden administration argued that some advance notice was needed to help states wind down assistance programs and avoid “wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system” that a more abrupt change would create.

The change will mean Americans will have to pay their share for COVID-19 tests and treatments, and maybe even vaccines, that have been free.

Starting April 1, states will again be able to remove people from Medicaid if they no longer qualify. Some 13% of enrollees could lose coverage as a result.

Medicare coverage of telehealth will continue through the end of 2024.

The change could also interfere with pandemic data collection, because states would become exempt from sharing case counts and death rates with the CDC, notes Cheyenne Haslett at ABC News.

The end of the emergencies also has other political consequences. It ends the Title 42 policy that has limited entry of migrants at the U.S. border. It could also scuttle the Biden administration’s plans for student loan forgiveness, writes Solcyre Burga at Time.

In addition to these practical considerations, the end of the emergencies sends a powerful message about ongoing risks from the coronavirus, Jennifer Kates, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told The New York Times. “It might let people let their guard down,” she said.

Many have already done that. Fewer than 16% of people have received the latest vaccine, for example, while COVID continues to kill hundreds of Americans every day. 

The World Health Organization still considers the pandemic a public health emergency, but has indicated the crisis is in transition.

“There is no ‘level of disease’ that defines a pandemic or emergency,” notes epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina on her blog. The winter so far has stress-tested the health system with ongoing omicron infections, and thus far, hospitals haven’t been utterly overwhelmed. “Given this,” writes Jetelina, “I agree that we are not in an emergency phase in the U.S.”

But the nation is not yet in an endemic, predictable phase either, she adds. “This will likely take years.”

Experts support additional oversight of pathogen research

The nation’s biosecurity advisors have backed a new set of tighter regulations for studies of pathogens with the potential to harm humans.

However, they raised so many concerns that the new recommendations will likely be modified before they’re finalized as guidelines, reports Sara Reardon at Nature.

In the past, scientists aiming to alter pathogens were subject to extra oversight if their organisms of interest were on a list of “select agents” — such as the coronavirus or the bacterium that causes anthrax. This additional review kicks in if the scientists plan certain categories of concerning research, such as adding drug resistance or changing the species a pathogen could infect.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) unanimously — if hesitantly, on the part of some members — supported new rules that would add to oversight on studies of any pathogen that infects people, animals, or plants at the Jan. 27 meeting. The regulations would apply to work “reasonably anticipated” to generate a pathogen that could create a “severe threat to public health.”

“The recommendation reflects the heightened concern about biosafety and biosecurity catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes Jocelyn Kaiser at Science. “Many virologists worry the new reviews could delay work with relatively benign agents such as cold viruses, herpesviruses, and viruses modified to treat cancer.”

Some board members suggested the new rules might make it more difficult to develop vaccines and treatments for rapidly evolving pathogens, reports Sarah Owermohle at STAT.

Gerald Parker, the chair of NSABB and a biosecurity expert at Texas A&M, said the full review would likely be required for “a very small subset of research.”

It’s not clear when the new rules might be modified and adopted by the National Institutes of Health, which funds much of the nation’s biological research. The NSABB recommended the nation create a special office to help researchers deal with the additional review.

The changes would only apply to studies funded by the U.S. government, though some committee members expressed interest in regulating privately funded research as well. Such a change would likely require Congressional action.

COVID is No. 8 cause of death among children

The coronavirus has leapt over influenza and pneumonia to become the most common infectious disease that kills U.S. children, according to a report in JAMA Pediatrics.

Overall, it’s the eighth most common cause of death in kids. Because child death is rare, the rate was just one death per 100,000 children from August 2021 to July 2022.

“Just because the numbers are so much lower in children does not mean that they’re not impactful,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Infectious Diseases, told Deidre McPhillips at CNN.

However, experts who spoke with the U.K.’s Science Media Centre criticized some of the study’s methods, and noted it doesn’t include data from the latest waves of infectious disease that hit in autumn. “These methodological choices result in an overestimation of rates, and make the claim that COVID is the leading cause of infectious disease deaths in children a misleading one in my view,” said Dr. Michael Absoud of King’s College London.

COVID-19 “caused ‘substantially’ more deaths than any vaccine-preventable disease historically,” notes McPhillips.

As of mid-January, approximately 43% of U.S. children had received at least their first dose of the COVID vaccine; fewer than one in ten have received the updated booster, McPhillips reports.

A recent JAMA Network study of more than 10 million children, ages 5 through 11, who received mRNA COVID vaccines confirmed the shots are safe and effective, reports Kenneth Bender at Contagion Live. Data show the vaccines reduce risk for infection, illness, and long-term complications, and that they pose lower risk for heart inflammation than the coronavirus itself.

“Children are still at risk of serious and rarely fatal infections,” wrote Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in a JAMA Pediatrics editorial. “Given the amount of information currently available to parents, the decision to vaccinate their children should be an easy one.”

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By Amber Dance

Pandemic rent crisis continues to plague America

COVID-19 created a perfect storm of rising rents as people started moving when they emerged from lockdown. Those pandemic effects are still rippling across the nation, causing housing costs to rise even in cities that were once affordable, report Holly Fuong and Monica Potts at FiveThirtyEight.

Meanwhile, the threat of a looming recession and the end of pandemic programs that protected tenants are likely to make things worse for many renters.

Making rent has long been a problem for many Americans, but COVID exacerbated the situation. People delayed moves during lockdowns, so rents initially fell, but then they rose as people moved at a higher rate when that phase of the pandemic ended. Others moved to a new place when remote work became an option. And many people purchased vacation homes in desirable areas, making it harder for seasonal workers and low-income people in those regions to afford to rent.

The FiveThirtyEight analysis found rents rose the most — more than 15% — in southern and western cities such as Miami, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

It took longer for pandemic effects to reach cities that used to be affordable, such as Cleveland. Now, those regions are the only affordable places left, boosting their appeal and, in turn, keeping rent high, said Rob Warnock, a senior research associate at Apartment List.

Those high rents — in some places as much as 30% higher than before the pandemic — push the lowest-income renters into worse living conditions, said Warnock.

Julie Wisneski, director of housing stability at the United Way of Greater Cleveland, says many low-income families can only afford rentals that have dangerous conditions such as lead paint and broken stairs.

Some cities, including Cleveland, are trying to help by passing ordinances to keep rents stable or delay evictions.

“But those are piecemeal solutions to a fundamental problem,” write Potts and Fuong. “There is not enough housing for people to live in, and it’s gotten more unaffordable for a wider swath of Americans.”

Biden administration plans end to national emergency

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra extended the national COVID-19 public health emergency last week, for the 12th time, but it may be the last.

“There’s still a lot of COVID out there, and the public health emergency and his determination gives us tools to fight this,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told CNN. The rise of the contagious XBB.1.5 variant is just one reason to extend it, Jha said.

The renewal means COVID vaccines and treatments like Paxlovid remain free, for now.

Though there are no definite plans, “senior Biden officials are targeting an end to the emergency designation as soon as this spring,” reports Adam Cancryn at Politico.

“The internal planning for the end stage of the crisis also amounts to an acknowledgement that the White House is more limited than ever in its ability to keep up the fight,” Cancryn adds. 

Federal funds to battle the pandemic are running dry and Republicans in Congress are loath to provide more. 

State governments and many citizens are also ready to move on.

But the end of the emergency could endanger vulnerable populations, including minority communities, the elderly, health care workers, immunocompromised individuals and people with long COVID, writes Ian Lopez at Bloomberg Law. 

It could also make protective measures unaffordable for uninsured people. For example, Moderna announced that its COVID vaccine could cost as much as $130 once its government contracts end.

“I don’t think that we’re ready,” said Brietta Clark, a specialist in inequity and health care law at Loyola Marymount University.

GOP-led House takes aim at COVID origins, U.S. response

The newly Republican-led House of Representatives is changing up its focus on COVID.

Under Democratic leadership, a coronavirus committee focused on misinformation, a lack of pandemic preparedness and early missteps in the U.S. response, writes Sarah Owermohle at STAT. It also investigated COVID aid fraud.

The new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic “will evolve into a Biden administration nightmare,” she writes.

This group is more interested in investigating whether the virus emerged from unsafe research practices in China, criticizing the U.S.’s funding of so-called “gain-of-function” research, and probing the spending of nearly $5 trillion in emergency federal aid, writes Tony Romm at The Washington Post.

“I believe every American, regardless of their political ideology, would like to know the truth,” said Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky.

Congress’ energies would be better focused on future potential outbreaks, argues science journalist and Council on Foreign Relations press fellow Amy Maxmen in a Post opinion. Passing the Prevent Pandemics Act would ensure the CDC keeps its outbreak plans up-to-date and would give the Department of Health and Human Services the means to roll out testing much more quickly than happened with COVID-19.

“It is essential that Congress act this year,” writes Maxmen. “If the next epidemic causes as much unnecessary devastation as this one, today’s uninterested leaders will be among those to blame.”

Public health experts see value, challenges in wastewater

As testing sites shutter and more and more people test at home, the answer to more accurate COVID monitoring could be in the sewer. 

Wastewater testing “lights a candle in the darkness,” Bernd Gawlik, a water quality expert with the European Commission, told Jennifer Rigby at Reuters.

The approach holds so much promise that international representatives met in London last week to discuss a global wastewater monitoring system. 

Testing of wastewater in airplanes on flights originating in China is expected to open a window onto the outbreak in that nation, reports Agence France-Presse. 

Ultimately, public health experts would like to be able to check a wastewater report much like they check the weather before getting dressed for the day. But there are several difficulties in making that happen, reports Brittany Trang at STAT. 

Unlike individual testing, wastewater results can’t indicate the precise number of people infected. Instead, the CDC’s system, covering about 1,250 U.S. sites, broadly tracks if COVID levels are going up or down in a community. 

And sewer systems don’t follow standard geographical regions like ZIP codes or county lines, compounding the challenge of interpreting and applying the data.

But if implemented widely, wastewater testing could sniff out not just the coronavirus and its variants, but also other infectious agents, or even other public health problems such as opioid abuse.

“It allows us to do public health with our blinders off and really is the future of public health surveillance,” said Megan Diamond, director of global health partnerships at the Rockefeller Foundation.

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BEIJING (AP) — The Chinese government sharply criticized COVID-19 testing requirements imposed on visitors from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved, which include the U.S. and several European nations.

“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing Tuesday.

“We are firmly opposed to attempts to manipulate the COVID measures for political purposes and will take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity,” she said. Mao did not specify what steps China might take.

The comments were China’s sharpest to date on the issue. Australia and Canada this week joined a growing list of countries requiring travelers from China to take a COVID-19 test prior to boarding their flight, as China battles a nationwide outbreak of the coronavirus after abruptly easing restrictions that were in place for much of the pandemic.

Other countries including the U.S., India, Japan, South Korea and several European nations have announced tougher COVID-19 measures on travelers from China amid concerns over a lack of data on infections in China and fears that new variants may emerge.

China has had some of the toughest entry requirements for people arriving from abroad. It is about to drop a mandatory five-day quarantine for all arrivals but will still require a negative COVID-19 test within 48 hours of the flight.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “there’s no cause for retaliation” by Beijing for countries “taking prudent health measures to protect their citizens” with COVID-related restrictions on travelers coming from China. She added that restrictions were “based on public health and science.”

“This is something that all of us, (and) other countries are doing to make sure that we are protecting our citizens here,” Jean-Pierre said.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne defended the tests. Starting Wednesday, anyone flying from China to France will have to present a negative virus test taken within the previous 48 hours and be subject to random testing on arrival.

“We are in our role, my government is in its role, protecting the French,” Borne said Tuesday on France-Info radio.

The U.K. will require that passengers from China take a COVID test before boarding the plane from Thursday. Transport Secretary Mark Harper said the requirement is for “collecting information” because Beijing isn’t sharing coronavirus data.

Health officials will test a sample of passengers when they arrive in the U.K., but no quarantine is required for those who test positive, he said.

“The policy for arrivals from China is primarily about collecting information that the Chinese government is not sharing with the international community,” Harper told the LBC radio station on Tuesday.

Sweden’s Public Health Agency said Tuesday that it had urged the government to require travelers from China to present a recent negative COVID-19 test.

The statement from the agency comes as Sweden, which has taken over EU’s rotating presidency, has called a meeting of the EU’s crisis management mechanism for Wednesday to try to agree on a common European line.

The Swedish government “is preparing to be able to introduce travel restrictions. At the same time, we are conducting a dialogue with our European colleagues to get the same rules as possible in the EU,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer said in a statement.

Austria, too, plans to test the wastewater of all planes arriving from China for new variants of the coronavirus, the Austria Press Agency reported Tuesday, following a similar announcement by Belgium a day earlier.

Chinese health officials said last week that they had submitted data to GISAID, a global platform for sharing coronavirus data.

The versions of the virus fueling infections in China “closely resemble” those that have been seen in different parts of the world between July and December, GISAID said Monday.

Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies viruses in the Christian Medical College of Vellore in India, said that the information from China, albeit limited, seemed to suggest that “the pattern was holding” and that there wasn’t any sign of a worrisome variant emerging.

Mi Feng, the spokesperson for China’s National Health Commission, said Tuesday that authorities maintain an open and transparent attitude. He noted that they had held two technical exchange meetings with the WHO last month on the overall situation, medical treatment, vaccination and other issues.

Mi Feng, the spokesperson for China’s National Health Commission, said authorities have been open and transparent since the start of the pandemic three years ago. China held technical exchange meetings twice with the WHO last month on the overall situation, medical treatment, vaccination and other issues, he said Tuesday.

A senior Hong Kong official also criticized the steps taken by some other countries. Some have applied the requirements to passengers from Hong Kong and Macao, both semiautonomous Chinese territories, as well as mainland China.

Hong Kong Chief Secretary Eric Chan said in a Facebook post that the government had written to various consulates on Monday to express its concerns over the “unnecessary and inappropriate” rules.

Some experts have questioned the effectiveness of the testing. Kerry Bowman, assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, said that people can test positive long after entering the country.

The requirement is “not based on science at this point,” he said after Canada announced measures last weekend.

China, which for most of the pandemic adopted a “zero-COVID” strategy that imposed harsh restrictions aimed at stamping out the virus, abruptly eased those measures in December.

Chinese authorities previously said that from Jan. 8, overseas travelers would no longer need to quarantine upon arriving in China, paving the way for Chinese residents to travel.

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