Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - China cut the quarantine time for people coming into the country by half on Tuesday. This is a big chang...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - China cut the quarantine time for people coming into the country by half on Tuesday. This is a big change to one of the world's strictest COVID-19 rules, which has stopped people from going in and out of the country since 2020.
The National Health Commission said in a statement that quarantine at centralised facilities has been cut from 14 to 7 days, and that health monitoring at home has been cut from 7 to 3 days.
The new rules from the health authority also made it easier for people who are close to people who have tested positive for the new coronavirus to leave quarantine.
In the past few months, China has slowly eased its COVID restrictions on cross-border travellers. Health officials say that the shorter incubation period of the Omicron variant makes it possible to change quarantine periods.
Beijing, the capital of China, has already cut the quarantine period at centralised facilities from 14 days to 10 days in the past few months.
Last month, China also got rid of some COVID-19 test requirements for people flying in from places like the U.S.
Both the Hang Seng Index and the CSI300 Index went up. The Hang Seng Index made up for its losses and went up about 0.4%, while the CSI300 Index went up about 0.7%.
Shares of tourism companies on the mainland went up by more than 5%.
OUT OF TROUBLE
On Tuesday, both Beijing and Shanghai said that there were no new COVID infections in their cities. This was the first time since late February that both cities were clear at the same time, after months of fighting their worst outbreaks ever.
The two cities reached the milestone on Monday after their daily caseloads dropped to single digits over the past week. This made it possible for people in Shanghai to slowly start eating in restaurants again and for people in Beijing to reopen some places for fun, like the Universal Beijing Resort.
On Saturday, the head of the Shanghai Communist Party, Li Qiang, said that the city had "won the war to defend Shanghai" against COVID-19. This came after a two-month lockdown of the whole city, which was finally lifted in early June.
Shanghai Disney Resort, which is owned by Walt Disney Co., said on Tuesday that the Disneyland theme park would open again on June 30. It had been closed for more than three months.
Authorities, however, remained cautious and were adamant that the government's so-called "dynamic zero COVID" policy, which aims to stop flare-ups from spreading as they happen, remains in place.
Cai Qi, the city's top Communist Party leader, was quoted in a report by the party-backed Beijing Daily as saying that Beijing would "fight against any new outbreaks right away and quickly, and break their transmission channel."
On Monday, Cai was said to have said that the city would build "a solid virus barrier."
Earlier on Monday, it seems that the Beijing Daily misquoted Cai as saying that the city would keep trying to control COVID for "the next five years."
After that, the reference was taken out of the paper, and the head of the paper, Zhao Jingyun, said it was a mistake. However, some people still thought it was suspicious.
"It can't have been a mistake, right? It's meant to find out what people think! "said a person on the social media site Weibo.
Even if it was a mistake, another Weibo user said, "At least the higher-ups now know how helpless we all feel and how much we hate the current policies to fight the flu."
Even though COVID restrictions have been loosened in Beijing and Shanghai, the 47 million people who live there have been told to take COVID tests every few days so they can keep using public spaces and transportation.
On June 27, 22 infections that were spread within China were reported. Five of these were in Shenzhen, which is a technology hub in the south.
