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People wait in the arrivals area of ​​Terminal 5 at Heathrow International Airport.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

LONDON – Britain and France said Thursday morning they had no current plans to reintroduce mandatory Covid-19 testing or additional requirements for travelers entering the country.

Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Thursday afternoon he expected “some clarification” on new rules for arrivals from the country’s Department for Transport on either Thursday or Friday.

It comes as several nations announced new measures in response to China’s easing of Covid restrictions amid a suspected rise in infections but reduced domestic testing. Beijing ended its quarantine on arrival on Monday, prompting many to book their first overseas trips in years.

Italy, the center of the first outbreak in Europe in early 2020, became the first country in the region to announce on Wednesday that mandatory antigen swabs would be required of all travelers from China.

On a December 26 flight from China to Milan’s Malpensa Airport, 52% of passengers tested positive for Covid, la Repubblica reported.

European Union health officials were locked in talks Thursday to try to coordinate a response.

“From a scientific point of view, there is no reason at this stage to reintroduce border controls,” said Brigitte Autran, head of France’s health risk assessment committee COVARS, according to a Reuters report on French radio Classique.

German, Portuguese and Austrian officials also seemed reluctant to introduce new measures.

However, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told a press conference that her country’s testing measures may be ineffective if not implemented across the EU, as many travelers enter Italy via other Schengen countries.

She said preliminary testing showed Covid-positive travelers from China were aware of Omicron variants, Reuters reported.

Italy’s National Institute for Infectious Diseases reportedly called for an increase in testing for people arriving from China. “It would be better if the surveillance was coordinated at European level,” the institute said, according to a translation of the Ansa news agency.

“Italy cannot be the only country implementing anti-Covid checks at airports for people arriving from China,” Italian Transport Minister Matteo Salvini said on Twitter.

The US said from January 5 all arrivals from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau must present a negative Covid test taken within two days of departure.

India will require a negative test from passengers arriving from China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand, with passengers being quarantined if they test positive or exhibit Covid symptoms.

Japan and Taiwan will conduct tests upon arrival of passengers from mainland China.

While the UK government said there were no plans to reintroduce Covid testing or additional requirements for arrivals in the country, it said it would monitor the situation until Thursday.

It could herald a change in policy, particularly if a wave of other European countries reintroduce testing.

Officials have cited a lack of published information from China about new variants as a reason for increased precautionary measures.

Beijing says its latest outbreak is due to the highly transmissible but less deadly Omicron variant. But a lack of data and the country’s track record of obscuring reality has led many nations to tread cautiously.

A fever clinic converted into a high school is seen here on December 28, 2022 in Fuzhou, Fujian province.

Wang Dongming | China news service | Getty Images

BEIJING – A dangerous new variant of Covid-19 is unlikely to spread in China, said Dr. Chris Murray, director of a health research center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

His Friday comments on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” come as US health officials this week warned of the possibility of a new variant of Covid emerging in China’s nationwide outbreak – and how Beijing’s lack of transparency is delaying identifying public health risks could.

Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, pointed out that there have probably been billions of omicron infections worldwide this year, but no new Covid variant has emerged, only subvariants of omicron.

“So I would rate the risk that there is a dangerous new variant in China as quite low,” Murray said. He noted that “some very special properties” are required for a new variant to emerge and replace Omicron.

The variant was first detected in South Africa more than a year ago. Omicron is far more transmissible but causes less severe disease than when Covid first appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.

Unlike much of the world, China’s Covid wave this month is affecting a population of 1.4 billion, most of whom are becoming infected for the first time. Only domestically produced vaccines are widely available for local people.

Beijing suddenly eased many Covid-related movement restrictions this month. Authorities also announced on Monday that they would lift entry quarantine from Jan. 8 and resume passport processing for Chinese citizens who wish to travel abroad for tourism purposes.

The US, Japan and some other countries responded this week by announcing new Covid testing requirements for travelers from China.

Need for hospitalization, dates of death

Murray said a total travel ban, if proposed, “wouldn’t make sense” and that it “wouldn’t have any testing requirements”.

“The argument being made is that we need more transparency about what’s happening in China,” Murray said.

“The earliest sign of a new variant is actually going to be a change in hospitalizations or the death rate associated with Covid, and not just a lot of infections because we know Omicron is doing that,” he said.

Read more about China from CNBC Pro

China’s National Health Commission said Sunday it would halt the daily release of information on Covid infections and deaths. However, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been running daily reports – which, together with hospital discharges, show only thousands of new Covid infections per day and a handful of deaths. Covid tests are no longer mandatory in China.

Publications on the China Disease Control Center’s website show that its director, Shen Hongbing, held online meetings with his US counterpart and the head of the UK’s health security agency this month.

Covid risks

As for the theory that viruses adapt to keep their hosts alive, Murray cautioned that it holds “over a fairly long period of time, not months or years.”

Genomic research shows it’s still possible for a mutation to arise that causes more serious disease, Murray said. “I think it would be unwise to just assume that all variants will be like Omicron.”

A study published in Nature Medicine in November also found that contracting Covid-19 more than once increases the risk of organ failure and death.

As healthcare becomes increasingly digitized, scientists, physicians and researchers must attempt to decipher unprecedented amounts of data in order to adequately personalize care. The excess of information available to these experts often exceeds their ability to consume and analyze it. AmazonThe cloud unit of has been working to fill this gap.

Amazon Web Services recently rolled out the general availability of Amazon Omics, which helps researchers store and analyze omic data such as DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. The service provides customers with the underlying infrastructure they need to make sense of big data so they can spend more time making new scientific discoveries.

AWS generates a significant portion of Amazon’s revenue and generated $20.5 billion in the third quarter. The cloud computing business has expanded into healthcare, and while AWS doesn’t disclose revenue forecasts for specific services, the global genomic data analysis market size is expected to reach $2.15 billion by 2030, according to a report by Straits Research.

dr Taha Kass-Hout, chief medical officer at AWS, said that the vast majority of healthcare data is inherently unstructured, meaning about 97% of it goes unused. Indexing and understanding this information is challenging, especially when researchers are collecting omics data from tens of thousands of patients.

Prior to Amazon, Kass-Hout served two terms under President Barack Obama and was the first Chief Health Information Officer at the US Food and Drug Administration.

Sequencing a human genome can require anywhere from 80 to 150 gigabytes of storage space, Kass-Hout said, and some research projects are looking at petabytes and exabytes of genomic information.

“You’re talking about almost nine Harry Potter values ​​if you want to print it on a printer,” Kass-Hout told CNBC. “And that’s just for one person.”

Amazon Omics helps researchers organize their data by providing them with three components that they can use individually or collectively. Omics-enabled object storage helps researchers store and share raw sequence data; Omics Workflows helps run workflows that process raw sequence data at scale; and Omics Analytics simplifies the sequence processing output.

More than a dozen customers and partners have tested a beta version of the service and are already using Amazon Omics.

For Jeffrey Pennington, chief research informatics officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the impact is already being felt.

Pennington works in the Department of Biomedicine and Health Informatics, which uses data and technology to solve problems in children’s health. He said the department spent five years expanding the infrastructure to analyze omics data and now they don’t have to build or maintain it themselves.

“We’re a large pediatric academic medical center, but we’re still not big enough to learn and build everything needed to use omic data productively,” said Pennington. “Our time and energy, our efforts and our financial resources are far better spent putting the puzzle together than creating those pieces in the first place.”

Amazon Omics also encourages collaboration between large research groups, smaller clinical groups, and intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, said Boris Oklander, co-founder and chief technology officer of C2i Genomics.

C2i is a biotechnology company working to use genomic data to develop personalized treatments for cancer. Oklander said the company participated in the beta for Amazon Omics after developing its own data analysis technology.

He said Amazon Omics has created a collaborative ecosystem that eliminates the need for researchers to build a complex technology from scratch.

“We’re just democratizing,” he said. “This kind of service is something that makes it possible [us] to unlock the value of the investments that various players are making in this space.”

Other big technology companies have developed similar tools. MicrosoftMicrosoft’s Azure cloud computing platform introduced Microsoft Genomics in 2018 to help researchers interpret data generated by genomic technologies. GoogleCloud Life Sciences technology also enables researchers to process biomedical data at scale.

Pennington said the Broad Institute and DNAnexus also offer popular genomic data analysis services, but said they’re difficult to maintain and can analyze fewer data types than Amazon Omics.

Given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of Omic data, Kass-Hout said protecting privacy and patient data is “job zero” for AWS. He said AWS uses more than 300 security, compliance, and governance services and supports 98 security standards and compliance certifications. In doing so, AWS goes “well beyond” regulatory compliance, Kass-Hout said, and also makes best-practice resources and encryption tools available to its customers.

Customers are also responsible for building secure applications on top of Amazon Omics services that prevent AWS from seeing or using the data.

Kass-Hout said the ultimate purpose of Amazon Omics is to efficiently index information so researchers can focus on making real advances in precision medicine.

“If the past decade has been about the digitization of the healthcare and life sciences industry, I firmly believe that the next decade is about understanding that data in a way that is now [where] we can find new therapeutics, new diagnostics and more targeted therapies,” he said.