Beijing: China will reopen its borders to inbound travellers from January 8, putting the country on track to emerge from three years of self-imposed global isolation under a Covid Zero policy that battered the economy and fueled historic public discontent.
Henceforth, people visiting China will only be required to obtain negative Covid test results within 48 hours of departure, a statement from the National Health Commission on Monday read. Presently, people arriving in China need to be in of eight days isolation, including five days at a designated quarantine hotel, or central facility, followed by three days at home.
The Chinese government Tuesday said it will facilitate visa applications for foreigners who need to travel to China for everything from businesses and studies to family reunions. Similarly, outbound tourism, which dwindled to almost nothing during the pandemic, will resume in an orderly fashion. Current limits on the number of international flights between China and the rest of the world and passenger capacity will also be removed, said the statement.
The country also downgraded the management of Covid from the top level to the second highest, effectively removing the legal justification for aggressive Covid Zero restrictions. However, the National Health Commission will continue to monitor the spread of the virus and take necessary measures to suppress the peak of Covid outbreaks.
“Our priority now needs to change from preventing and controlling infection to treatment, with the goal of ensuring the health, preventing severe disease and enabling a stable orderly transition as we adjust our Covid response,” Liang Wannian, a senior health official overseeing China’s Covid response throughout the pandemic, said in an interview with People’s Daily on Tuesday.
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention may also reduce the frequency of reporting cases, ultimately changing to a monthly report from the current daily publication, Li Qun, a China CDC official, said.
Since late November, when discontent with harsh Covid Zero rules boiled over and sparked protests in cities across the country of 1.4 billion, officials have rapidly dismantled many of their harshest pandemic measures. The speed of change has left health experts puzzled and residents scrambling to adjust to a new way of life that’s seen infections explode and made the border curbs – put in place to keep the virus out of China – increasingly irrelevant.
The Health Commission also said China will enhance the treatment of severe patients by boosting the supply of life-saving medical devices, such as ventilators, and the capacity of intensive care units. It will also repurpose quarantine facilities into hospitals for treating Covid patients.
China has already ramped up the share of ICU beds from less than 4 per 10,000 people to 10.6 in about a month time while another 70,000 beds across the country can be converted for intensive care, Jiao Yahui, a senior NHC official overseeing hospitals said in a separate People’s Daily interview published on Tuesday.
