Such a policy would offer a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the United States than new travel restrictions announced this week by the U.S. and other countries, which require mandatory negative COVID tests for travelers from China, three infectious disease experts told Reuters.A better solution would be testing wastewater from airlines, which would offer a clearer picture of how the virus is mutating, given China's lack of data transparency, said Dr Eric Topol, a genomics expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.China has said criticism of its COVID statistics is groundless, and downplayed the risk of new variants, saying it expects mutations to be more infectious but less severe.The agency is grappling with a lack of transparency about COVID in China after the country of 1.4 billion people abruptly lifted strict COVID lockdowns and testing policies, unleashing the virus into an undervaccinated and previously unexposed population.David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said increasing genomic surveillance is important, and wastewater sampling could be helpful, but the testing takes time."