On Monday night, China lifted quarantine for incoming travelers starting Jan. 8, dismantling the last remaining of its strict zero-covid policy and ending some of the world’s toughest border restrictions.
The move was greeted with jubilation by Chinese citizens, who rushed to book foreign flights electronically, prompting a spike in ticket prices.
Hospitals and crematoria across China continue to be hit by the influx of mostly elderly people.
AFP journalists on Wednesday saw dozens of elderly covid patients lying on stretchers in hospital emergency departments in Tianjin, 140 kilometers (87 miles) southwest of the capital, Beijing.
Medical staff “almost everything” continues to work despite testing positive for the virus, a doctor said.
Other countries have expressed considerations about the possibility of new variants emerging as China battles the world’s most acute infections.
The United States will require negative covid tests from all air travelers from China, saying Beijing is sharing enough data on the rise in coronavirus cases there, fitness officials said Wednesday.
Starting Jan. 5, “all air passengers from China, over the age of two, will be required to receive an email no later than two days before departing China, Hong Kong and Macau, and provide a negative result to departing airlines,” a federal fitness official said.
Countries such as Japan, India and Italy have PCR tests on arrival for Chinese passengers.
Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its own, said on Wednesday it would screen mainland travelers for the virus.
China’s easing of measures brought down the curtain on a zero-covid regime of mass testing, lockdowns and long quarantines that has shut down its economy and sparked large-scale nationwide protests.
“Currently, the evolution of the epidemic scenario in China is broadly predictable and controlled,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Wednesday.
“Exaggeration, slander and political manipulation with ulterior motives trump fact-checking,” Wang added, calling Western media reports about China’s rise in Covid “completely biased. “
All passengers arriving in China will be required to go through mandatory centralized quarantine from March 2020. The isolation era was reduced from 3 weeks to a week in June and to five days last month.
The end of this rule in January will also see covid-19 downgraded to a Class B infectious disease, allowing the government to adopt more flexible controls.
China’s immigration government announced Tuesday that it will resume issuing passports for tourists from Jan. 8, following years of strict exit controls.
The winter wave comes ahead of next month’s primary public holiday, when millions of others are expected to travel to their hometowns to be reunited with loved ones.
The Chinese government has the scale of the outbreak now “impossible” to trace and has tightened the criteria for defining covid deaths.
China’s Center for Disease Prevention and Control on Wednesday reported 5,231 new covid cases and 3 deaths nationwide, which is likely a drastic undercount, as other people are no longer required to report infections to authorities.
Authorities are using knowledge from online surveys, hospital visits, requests for fever medication and emergency calls to “make up for gaps in (officially) reported figures,” disease official Yin Wenwu told a news conference on Tuesday.
With the country facing a shortage of basic medicines, the Beijing city government plans to distribute the oral Covid drug Paxlovid to local hospitals and clinics in the network. It is still very difficult for other people to obtain.
Processing developed in the U. S. The U. S. will soon be available on Meitua’s JD. com e-commerce platform and delivery platform in the final days before they sold out.
(AFP)