China lifts the mandatory quarantine for foreign travelers on Sunday, ending three years of self-imposed isolation and at a time when it faces a wave of Covid-19 unprecedented since the start of the pandemic.
After some three years with some of the most severe restrictions in the world, which damaged its economy and ended up triggering nationwide protests, the Chinese authorities decided, at the end of December, to abruptly abolish most of the measures to control the Pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The last step in the lifting of restrictions is taken on Sunday with the end of mandatory hotel quarantines for all people arriving in the country since March 2020.
Initially three weeks, the duration of this quarantine had already been reduced to one week last summer, then to five days in November.
The announcement of the end of the so-called “Covid zero” policy and the mandatory quarantine led the Chinese to make plans to travel abroad, with an exponential increase in traffic on reservation sites, Agence France-Presse reported.
As a result of this Chinese decision to open its borders, more than a dozen countries, including Portugal, began to require travelers from that country to test negative for Covid-19 to enter their territories.
China is facing an unprecedented wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections, a situation expected to worsen with the Chinese New Year festivities in late January, when millions of people are expected to flock from megacities to the countryside to visit their family members, many of whom are elderly and vulnerable.
The Minister of Health, Manuel Pizarro, said that the operation of random tests of Covid-19 to travelers from China, which began today, “manifestly went well”, without cause for alarm.
According to Manuel Pizarro, in this operation “what is at stake is not creating alarmism”, but collecting information that “allows us to safely guide the steps that follow.”
“Unfortunately we cannot have full confidence in the information provided to us by the Chinese authorities, who manifestly devalue part of that information,” lamented the official.
Source: TSF
