China's National Health Commission, NHC, announced on Monday that beginning on January 8, visitors from outside the country will not need to be quarantined.
This suggests that the present practice of spending five days in a hotel and then three days at home will end on January 8. Arrivals will still be required to wear masks on flights and to have a negative Covid test result within 48 hours of departure, The Financial Times reports.
The announcement was a part of a larger effort by China to remove the last vestiges of the zero-Covid policy, which cut off the nation from the rest of the world for almost three years and successfully limited the spread of the virus for a considerable amount of time.
Over 90% of cases of the Omicron variant were "mild or asymptomatic," the NHC stated in what many have interpreted as a shift in tone.
The Chinese government has also abandoned the requirement that positive cases be quarantined at centralized facilities as of this month.
Daily case tallies were usually published by the NHC, but the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, which took over the function from the NHC declared on Tuesday that it will only publish Covid data monthly, under the downgraded classification.
Also on Tuesday, the Chinese immigration authority announced that starting on January 8, it would restart issuing visas to residents of the mainland who wish to travel abroad.
The National Immigration Administration announced that on the same day, it will start to issue entrance permits to Hong Kong for purposes of business or travel, and visa extensions and new approvals for holders of foreign passports will also restart.
To eliminate the virus within its borders, China had implemented a rigorous zero-Covid policy since the pandemic began, closing down several of its main cities and imposing quarantines on visitors from abroad.
International visitors who were coming into the country had to stay in a hotel room for three weeks at one point this year.
But, the central government was forced to modify its strategy in November after protesters demonstrated in the streets in a rare act of defiance.
However, since late this year, China's authorities have been battling to control a severe winter outbreak in several cities, including the capital Beijing, where the number of patients is estimated to be in the millions and the health system is under strain.
According to analysts, the virus might result in close to 1 million deaths.
Other zero-Covid rules, such as mass testing, have mostly been abandoned, and China's official data no longer accurately reflects the situation on the ground, The Financial Times said.
Under China's zero-Covid policy, residents had to take tests every few days at booths located in major cities and use their phones to scan a code to get access to buildings.
As cases multiplied quickly, such procedures generally ceased, but as recently as late November, people in Shanghai were still being transferred to central quarantine because they were close contacts of positive cases at bars.
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