China will remove quarantine requirements for travelers arriving from January 8 as the country dismantles the remnants of a zero-Covid regime that shut it off from the rest of the world for nearly three years.
The National Health Commission announced the move on Monday as part of a wider announcement that downgraded the country’s handling of Covid-19 and permanently abandoned a number of other preventive measures.
The NHC said more than 90 percent of cases of the Omicron variant were “mild or asymptomatic,” part of a shift in tone toward the coronavirus as it came to a country where until recently very few of the 1.4 billion population had contracted it.
The government, which this month also scrapped the requirement for positive cases to quarantine at central facilities, is now battling a severe winter outbreak with cases estimated to be in the hundreds of millions and health services under pressure
Models have estimated the virus could lead to nearly 1 million deaths, although China’s public data has stopped reflecting the situation on the ground and other zero-Covid rules, such as mass testing, have ended to a great extent.
Chinese stocks led the gains in the Asia-Pacific region on Tuesday after the announcement, with the CSI 300 up 1%, while the Shanghai Composite and Shenzhen Component indexes gained 0.8%. The Hong Kong exchange was closed.
China pursued a strict zero-Covid policy shortly after the pandemic emerged, locking down many of its largest cities and imposing quarantine requirements on foreign arrivals as part of an attempt to stamp out the virus within its borders. borders
Later this year, the policy began to unravel as authorities struggled to contain outbreaks in numerous cities, including the capital Beijing. Protesters took to the streets in November in a rare show of defiance against the central government’s approach, which was dramatically relaxed soon after.
Monday’s announcement signaled the end of the zero-Covid system that transformed China’s relationship with the outside world and that for long periods successfully limited the transmission of a virus that had ravaged every other advanced economy.
At one point this year, the quarantine rule required travelers to spend three weeks in a hotel room. The current policy of five days in a hotel followed by three days at home will end on January 8. Arrivals will still need to have a negative Covid test result within 48 hours of departure and wear masks on flights.
The sudden lifting of restrictions has already put immense pressure on China’s health system, particularly in Beijing, which was one of the centers of the outbreak before the policy was dropped and was thought to be one of the cities better prepared
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Recent economic data has highlighted the costs of the policy. Retail sales, a gauge of consumer spending, fell 5.9% year-on-year in November, worse than analysts’ expectations, while the economy is expected to miss the annual growth target of 5.5% which was already the lowest in decades.
But analysts have also warned of the economic and corporate costs of the virus itself as it sweeps the country, with Apple among the most vulnerable to supply chain problems.
With zero-Covid, China’s citizens had to get tested every few days at booths in major cities and scan a code on their phones to enter buildings. These practices have largely disappeared as cases multiplied rapidly, although as recently as late November, individuals in Shanghai were still being taken into central quarantine because they were close contacts of positive cases in bars.