From next month travelers entering the country will only need to have one negative test in the last 48 hours
End of the mandatory quarantine for those arriving in the country, starting from January 8, the Chinaas the health authorities announced today, since most of the measures to deal with the Covid-19 which were valid from 2020.
From next month travelers will only need to have one negative test (within the last 48 hours) to enter China, the Health Commission said.
China is the last major economy in the world to continue to quarantine new arrivals, even though the isolation period has been reduced in recent months. Today travelers are required to stay for 5 days in a hotel followed by another 3 days of home monitoring. Until June the quarantine amounted to 10 days and previously it reached 21.
The Health Commission said it no longer considers Covid-19 a “pneumonia” but a “communicable” disease, less dangerous.
Earlier today, the president of the country Xi Jinping ordered authorities to “build a dike” and “protect the lives” of people in China as infections surged after health measures were lifted on December 7.
Several crematoria interviewed by AFP said they have been receiving an unusually high number of bodies for cremation in recent days. The Chinese media, however, have not made any reference to this fact.
Hospitals are overcrowded and flu medicine is hard to come by in pharmacies as the country learns to live with the virus.
“We must organize a more targeted patriotic health campaign (…) and build a solid bulwark against the epidemic,” Xi said, without elaborating, in the statement broadcast by state-run CCTV.
According to estimates by several Western studies, the lifting of restrictions could lead to the death of up to 1 million people in the coming months.
On Sunday, Beijing announced that it will no longer release statistics on Covid-19.
Until recently, PCR tests, which were almost mandatory, allowed the epidemic to be monitored with some reliability. But now patients take the test themselves at home and rarely inform the authorities about the results. Based on the official tally, only 6 deaths from Covid-19 have been recorded since the measures were lifted, a number that experts believe is greatly underestimated.
RES-EMP
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