China on Friday announced a shortening of the quarantine period for overseas travelers and an end to the disruption of flights with Covid-19 cases on board, marking a major redefinition of the epidemic prevention strategy.
Anyone arriving in China will be required to undergo five days of quarantine at a government-designated hotel, followed by three days of home confinement, according to a statement from the National Health Commission.
The rules in place so far call for 10 days of quarantine, including a week in a hotel and three days at home.
This reduction will also apply to close contacts of infected people. Chinese strategy dictates that all direct contacts must comply with quarantine at designated facilities. Close contacts of direct contacts will no longer be identified, the statement added. To date, these third party contacts had to be quarantined at home.
Chinese authorities will also abolish the “circuit breaker” policy, which has affected air connections to the country in the past two years.
This measure implies that when five or more cases are detected on board, the connection is suspended for a week. If there are ten or more cases, the call is suspended for one month.
These changes are part of a set of 20 measures aimed at redefining China’s ‘zero cases’ Covid-19 strategy. This is the most comprehensive review of China’s approach.
The Asian country maintains a strategy of “zero cases” of Covid-19, which includes the confinement of neighborhoods, districts and entire cities, and the isolation of all cases and their direct contacts in designated facilities.
In total, China registered more than 10,000 new cases in the last 24 hours, the highest number since the end of April. While this number is low considering that China has 1.4 billion people, the geographic scale of the outbreak poses a challenge to the ‘zero cases’ strategy.
All 31 provincial-level regions in China have reported new infections in recent days. In addition to Guangdong, in the southeast, the central province of Henan and the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia have also diagnosed more than 1,000 cases in the past 24 hours. Other areas of the country reported several hundred new cases.
On Thursday, the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the apex of power in China, called for “improving the effectiveness of prevention work” and “overcoming formalism and bureaucracy,” calling for an approach of “improving “more specific and decisive” in dealing with outbreaks of the new coronavirus, in remarkably softer rhetoric than in previous statements.
The World Health Organization said last May that China’s extreme approach to containing Covid-19 is “unsustainable” due to the highly infectious nature of the Omicron variant.
However, Beijing has refused to approve the import of foreign messenger RNA vaccines to the mainland, which has already been allowed in the Chinese special administrative regions of Macau and Hong Kong since the start of the pandemic.
The vaccination rate among the elderly with home inoculations, less effective in preventing death and serious illness, is only 86%, according to official data.
Source: TSF
