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China will lift a strict border blockade that has been in place for nearly three years.
China announced that starting from January 8 next year, it will cancel the isolation management of inbound personnel, and announced that it will no longer implement isolation measures for domestic people infected with the new crown. Authorities also announced that the name “new crown pneumonia” will be changed to “novel coronavirus infection”.
China’s National Health Commission said in a statement on Monday (December 26) that passengers going to China will not need to apply for a health code and be quarantined after entry, but they will need to undergo a nucleic acid test 48 hours before departure.
Authorities will also facilitate visas for foreigners coming to China, cancel control measures on the number of international passenger flights, and gradually resume outbound travel for Chinese citizens, the statement said.
The move marks that China will gradually lift the strict border blockade that has been in place for nearly three years, and it also means that China is further turning to “coexisting with the virus”.
“The new coronavirus will exist in nature for a long time, and its pathogenicity has decreased significantly compared with the early stage, and the disease caused will gradually evolve into a common respiratory infectious disease.” China’s National Health and Medical Commission wrote in a notice.
Since the beginning of 2020, China has been managing COVID-19 as a Class A infectious disease of the same level as plague and cholera in the country’s Infectious Disease Law. Therefore, according to the “Frontier Health and Quarantine Law”, entry and exit personnel and luggage are required to undergo quarantine.
In August 2021, the authorities announced that, except for business, study abroad or emergency situations, most ordinary passports will not be issued or renewed for the time being.
According to the current epidemic prevention policy, passengers going to China still need to be quarantined in a government-designated quarantine point for 5 days and stay at home for 3 days.
Last week, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Lee Ka-chao, returned to Hong Kong after reporting on his duties in Beijing. He told the media that the central government has agreed to gradually complete customs clearance, and the target will be implemented by the middle of next month.
China’s “New Ten Measures” for the prevention of the new crown epidemic has been implemented for a week, and the people of Beijing are also experiencing some chaos when they regain their freedom.
For the past three years, China has been adopting a strict “clearance” policy of widespread nucleic acid testing and blockades of residential areas across the country, which has battered the Chinese economy and sparked China’s largest protests in years last month Activity.
But this month, Beijing took an abrupt policy u-turn and quickly lifted nearly all of the country’s coronavirus restrictions, a move welcomed by some but also sparking an unprecedented wave of infections across the country.
People in many cities have reported that hospitals are overcrowded and that fever and cold medicines are in short supply. Official figures from the city of Qingdao in Shandong province over the weekend showed that as many as 500,000 people could be infected in a single day in Qingdao alone.
At a funeral home in the western Chinese city of Chongqing, workers were scrambling to process the arrival of bodies as hearses and cars carrying the dead lined up in the parking lot.