eBay's protections for the buyer are in regards to the money, and for sellers are just focused on the service metrics aspect (i.e. ebay won't protect your funds from their policies during this time, but they may protect you from receiving late shipments, remove negative feedback, stuff like that). 

They did say they would be adding additional time to ETAs which should have in turn increased the time before a buyer can open a case, but I don't know if this has been extended to international deliveries, and if it has, when that came into place, nor how long the extensions are.