The Government said imposing entry restrictions on travellers from China was not "required or justified".
Covid-19 Response Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said there was minimal public health risk to New Zealand.
"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," she said.
Australia has joined the United States, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Canada in demanding all travellers present a negative test taken no more than 48 hours before departure.
China has threatened reciprocal measures against countries demanding travellers from its shores provide negative Covid-19 tests before boarding flights.
It was unclear what any reciprocal measure would entail as China already requires a negative PCR test for anyone crossing its borders.
Dr Verrall said BF7 was the prevalent variant in China and it had not caused significant outbreaks in other countries, such as New Zealand, which had already been exposed to the BA5 variant — "so public health measures are not required to protect New Zealanders".
She said Institute of Environmental Science and Research scientists would begin a programme to test wastewater from international flights to detect the virus.
This would be put in place in the "coming weeks".
Scientists would then assess whether that should replace the random, voluntary testing of travellers from China she outlined yesterday.
Dr Verrall said that would involve "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."
Act New Zealand welcomed the Government’s decision not to impose mandatory testing for arrivals from China.
“This is a sensible position, instead of importing 2020 panic into another new year," leader David Seymour said yesterday.
The Chinese government has rejected claims it has deliberately under-reported the total number of fatalities.
Global health officials have tried to determine the facts of China’s raging Covid outbreak and how to prevent a further spread.
China’s axing of its stringent anti-virus controls last month has unleashed Covid on a 1.4billion population that has little natural immunity, having been shielded from the virus since it emerged in Wuhan three years ago.
Officially, China has reported a small number of Covid deaths since the policy U-turn.
Last month, the World Health Organisation said it had not received data from China on new Covid hospitalisations since Beijing’s policy shift, prompting some health experts to question whether it might be hiding information about the extent of its outbreak.
China reported five new Covid deaths for January 3, compared with three a day earlier, bringing the official death toll to 5258 — low by global standards.
But the death toll is widely believed to be much higher.
British health data firm Airfinity has said about 9000 people in China are probably dying each day from Covid.
- The Ministry of Health is reporting New Zealand Covid-19 cases and deaths of people with the virus are decreasing.
In the past week, 22,770 cases have been reported — down from 32,000 the previous week.
Of the new cases, 30% or 6961 were reinfections. — RNZ/Reuters
