Beijing: China’s health body on Friday reduced the number of days incoming travelers must quarantine from 10 to eight days and removed a penalty for international airlines bringing virus cases into the country as it eases some of their 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 leaders pledged to follow “with tenacity” “the dynamic policy of zero Covid-19”. ” while minimizing economic and social disturbances.
The National Health Council announced a reduced quarantine period for international arrivals and close contacts of confirmed cases from seven days of centralized quarantine and three days of home health observation to a schedule of five plus three .
Health officials are no longer required to report secondary close contacts, according to the amended regulations.
It also removed the “switch” system under which airlines were temporarily suspended from flying specific routes in 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 on inbound flights to China will only be required to provide a negative nucleic acid test result within 48 hours instead of two,” according to the latest measures published by official media.
Within China, areas with outbreaks of Covid will only be identified as “high risk” or “low risk”, depending on the transmission of the epidemic and the number of infections. The “medium risk” classification for an area has been removed.
The adjustments to the Covid-19 policy do not mean that the country’s “zero-Covid” policy has been withdrawn, the NHC said.
“Instead, it is a gesture to streamline measures to better control outbreaks while ensuring normal economic and social activities as much as possible,” the NHC was quoted as saying by national broadcaster CCTV.
“Optimizing and adjusting prevention and control measures is not relaxing prevention and control, let alone opening up and ‘stretching’, but adapting to the new epidemic prevention and control situation and the new characteristics of the mutation of Covid-19”, explained the NHC. added
The Politburo committee met on Thursday to hear a report on the response to Covid-19, as well as to discuss and organize at least twenty measures to further optimize the work of epidemic prevention and control.
“The meeting stressed putting people and their lives above all else, avoiding both imported cases and domestic resurgences, and tenaciously pursuing the dynamic zero-Covid policy,” the official Xinhua news agency said in a report on the meeting.
The NHC on Friday reported 10,535 new cases of domestic transmission by Thursday, a low burden by global standards but the highest number of infections reported in China since April 29.
Beijing reported a record 118 new national cases in the same period, and authorities in many parts of the city urged residents to take daily nucleic acid tests or ban access to public spaces.
