Beijing: China’s health body on Friday reduced the number of days inbound travellers have to quarantine from 10 to eight days and scrapped a penalty for international airlines bringing in virus cases into the country as it eases some of its strict rules to restrict the spread of Covid-19.
The new measures were announced a day after President Xi Jinping chaired a meeting of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) top decision-making body, the Politburo standing committee, where the leaders vowed to “tenaciously” pursue “the dynamic zero-Covid policy” while minimising economic and social disruptions.
The National Health Council announced a shortened quarantine period for international arrivals and close contacts of confirmed cases from seven days of centralised quarantine and three days of health observation at home to a five-plus-three schedule.
Health officials are no longer required to report secondary close contacts, the modified regulations said.
It also scrapped the “circuit breaker” system under which airlines were temporarily suspended from flying specific routes into China for one to two weeks, depending on how many Covid-positive passengers were on the flight; Hong Kong withdrew a similar policy in July.
“Passengers of inbound flights to China will only need to provide one negative nucleic acid testing result within 48 hours instead of two,” according to the latest measures published by official media.
Within China, areas with Covid outbreaks will only be identified as either “high risk” or “low risk”, depending on epidemic transmission and the number of infections. The “medium-risk” classification for an area has been removed.
The Covid-19 policy adjustments does not mean that the country’s ‘zero-Covid’ policy has been withdrawn, the NHC said.
“Instead, it is a gesture to streamline the measures to better control the outbreaks while ensuring normal economic and social activities as much as possible,” the NHC was quoted as saying by national broadcaster CCTV.
“Optimising and adjusting prevention and control measures is not relaxing prevention and control, let alone opening up and ‘laying flat’, but to adapt to the new situation of epidemic prevention and control and the new characteristics of Covid-19 mutation,” the NHC added.
The Politburo committee met on Thursday to hear a report on Covid-19 response, as well as discuss and arrange at least twenty measures to further optimise epidemic prevention and control work.
“The meeting underscored putting the people and their lives above all else, preventing both imported cases and domestic resurgences, and tenaciously pursuing the dynamic zero-Covid policy,” official news agency Xinhua said in a report on the meeting.
The NHC on Friday reported 10,535 new domestically transmitted cases for Thursday, a low caseload by global standards, but the highest number of infections reported in China since April 29.
Beijing reported a record 118 new domestic cases in the same period, with authorities in many parts of the city urging residents to take daily nucleic acid tests or be barred from entering public spaces.
