If you save your Excel file as Unicode text, you should also use unicode to read it into SAS:
Filename Textfile '<path>' ENCODING='UTF16B';
data want;
infile textfile;
input....
But I do not quite understand that only some characters get converted to two bytes - according to the SAS documentation, the UTF-16 encodings store all characters as two bytes. Are you quite sure that you are not using UTF-8?
FWIW I didn't find a UTF-16 save as option in my Excel 365, only UTF-8 and UTF-BigEndian
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