by Ryan Woo and Tony Munroe
BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese health authorities on Friday eased some restrictions aimed at combating the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in China, reducing the duration of quarantine by two days for those who have been in contact with an infected person and travelers entering the country.
They also announced that airlines would no longer be sanctioned for bringing passengers infected with COVID-19 into Chinese territory.
The easing of restrictions, which comes a day after President Xi Jinping chaired the new Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, has been welcomed by markets, although many experts have warned that the measures are gradual and that the complete lifting of the health protocol is probably still a long way off.
People who have been in close contact with an infected person will only be subject to a quarantine of five days in a dedicated center, then three additional days at their home.
They previously had to stay seven days in a center and three additional days at home.
Quarantine periods imposed on travelers entering China have been similarly reduced.
Beijing will also stop trying to identify ‘secondary’ contacts, while continuing to identify relatives, and will revise its risk scale to ‘high’ and ‘low’, eliminating the ‘medium’ category, in a bid to minimize the number of people subject to control measures.
“Optimizing and adjusting prevention and control measures is not a relaxation of prevention and control, even less an opening and a ‘flattening’, but an adaptation to the new situation of prevention and control of epidemics and to the new characteristics of the mutation of COVID-19”, declared the National Health Commission (CNS).
The Chinese yuan is trading at its highest level in seven weeks after the announcement and the benchmark CSI 300 climbed 2.8%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped more than 7%, its most strong daily increase since March.
The easing of restrictions comes even as the number of cases in China reaches its highest level since April, with Beijing and Zhengzhou, in the center of the country, recording record numbers of new infections, and that many cities have expanded the containment measures.
Travel platform Qunar reported that search volumes for international flights had tripled from Thursday and continued to rise.
The health restrictions in force for almost three years are weighing increasingly heavily on the second largest economy in the world.
However, many experts say China is unlikely to start reopening before the start of the parliamentary session in March, at the earliest.
For Jörg Wuttke, President of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, the announcement is “a small step in the right direction” (…) “but the big question that concerns us all is knowing when the China will be ready to actually launch a vaccination campaign that will give it the herd immunity needed to truly open up the country.”
(Report Tony Munroe; French version Camille Raynaud and Diana Mandiá)