Opinion | America’s Covid Test Requirement For Chinese Is a Farce

Some public health experts have been quick to call out the new policy as useless in addressing the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, whose country has in place a similar testing requirement, called for the European Union to follow Italy’s lead in adopting the same policy but was denied by most member states on grounds of inefficacy. Indeed, without universal testing, contact tracing and masking mandates, selective reinforcement by geographic origin succeeds only in singling out the predominantly Chinese travelers and reviving rampant anti-Asian hate. In the place of coherent policy, similar requirements — in America, but also in a handful of other nations, such as Italy, India, Japan and Britain — are nothing more than the violent, involuntary jerk of a giant racist muscle.

For the better part of this year, the mainstream narrative in America has been that the pandemic is over and Covid is no longer a true danger. President Biden said so himself, and just 12 percent of all adults in the United States still view Covid-19 as a severe health risk. Even amid the winter “tripledemic,” no nationwide viral mitigating action has been taken, and pundits gleefully ridicule masking as fringe activism. Troubling reports of debilitating long-Covid symptoms and multiple reinfections have done little to influence policy, but as soon as China reopened to the world, the administration mobilized. The official narrative cites…