By Bernard Orr and David Latona
BEIJING/MADRID (Reuters) -Chinese state-media said COVID-19 testing requirements imposed by a growing number of countries on travellers from China were "discriminatory" and aimed to undermine China's re-opening, although a wave of infections has erupted across the country.
Having kept its borders all but shut for three years, imposing a strict regime of lockdowns and relentless testing, China abruptly reversed course toward living with the virus on Dec. 7, and infections have spread rapidly in recent weeks.
Some places have been taken aback by the scale of China's outbreak and expressed scepticism over Beijing's COVID statistics, with South Korea and Spain the latest countries on Friday to join the United States, India and others in imposing COVID tests for travellers from China.
Malaysia said it would screen all international arrivals for fever.
"The real intention is to sabotage China's three years of COVID-19 control efforts and attack the country's system," state-run tabloid Global Times said in an article late on Thursday, calling the restrictions "unfounded" and "discriminatory."
China will stop requiring inbound travellers to go into quarantine from Jan. 8. But it will still demand a negative PCR test result within 48 hours before departure.
TESTS
Acting a day after European Union health officials failed to agree on a joint course of action, Spain followed Italy's lead to become the second of the bloc's 27 members to require tests for travellers from China.
"At a national level, we will implement airport controls requiring all passengers coming from China to show a negative COVID-19 test or proof of a full vaccination course," Health Minister Carolina Darias said.
Over the past days, officials in France, Germany and Portugal have said they saw no need for now for new restrictions, while Austria has stressed the economic benefits of Chinese tourists' return to Europe.
Global spending by Chinese visitors was worth more than $250 billion a year before the pandemic.
The United States has raised concerns about potential mutations of the virus as it sweeps through the world's most populous country, as well as over China's data transparency.
The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention is considering sampling wastewater from international aircraft to track any emerging new variants, the agency told Reuters.
World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the WHO needed more information to assess the latest surge in infections in China, without taking a position on the issue of travel tests.
Meanwhile, a COVID vaccination campaign for German nationals in China started its pilot phase, the German ambassador in Beijing, Patricia Flor said on Twitter. A shipment of 11,500 doses of the BioNTech vaccine arrived last week, enough to give one shot each to half of the 20,000 or so German nationals residing in China.
'EXCESS MORTALITY'
The lifting of restrictions in China, after widespread protests against them in November, has overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes across the country, with scenes of people on intravenous drips by the roadside and lines of hearses outside crematoria fuelling public concern.
Health experts say China has been caught ill-prepared by the U-turn in policies long championed by President Xi Jinping.
In December, tenders put out by hospitals for key equipment such as ventilators and patient monitors were two to three times higher than in previous months, according to a Reuters review，suggesting hospitals were scrambling to plug shortages.
Experts say the elderly in rural areas may be particularly vulnerable because of inadequate medical resources. Next month's Lunar New Year festival, when hundreds of millions travel to their hometowns, will add to the risk.
China, a country of 1.4 billion people, reported one new COVID death for Thursday, same as the day before - numbers which do not match the experience of other countries after they re-opened.
China's official death toll of 5,247 since the pandemic began compares with more than 1 million deaths in the United States. Chinese-ruled Hong Kong, a city of 7.4 million, has reported more than 11,000 deaths.
UK-based health data firm Airfinity said on Thursday around 9,000 people in China are probably dying each day from COVID. Cumulative deaths in China since Dec. 1 have likely reached 100,000, with infections totalling 18.6 million, it said.
China's chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou said on Thursday that the difference between the number of deaths in the current wave of infections and the death rate for the same period in pandemic-free years would be studied to calculate the "excess mortality" and gauge any potential underestimate of deaths from COVID-19.
ECONOMIC WOES
The world's second-largest economy is expected to slow down further in the near term as factory workers and shoppers fall ill.
Consumers may need time to recover their confidence and spending appetite after losing income during lockdowns, while the private sector may have used its expansion funds to cover losses incurred due to the restrictions.
Chinese airlines, however, look set to be the early winners of the re-opening.
(Additional reporting by John Revill in Zurich and Kirsti Knolle in Berlin; Writing by Marius Zaharia and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Gerry Doyle & Simon Cameron-Moore)
