Time.news – China has announced the easing of the restrictive measures against Covid-19 at the national level, a clear shift that signals a change of approach by the Beijing authorities after the protests in recent weeks against the government’s “zero Covid” policy. The Joint Pandemic Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council, in a statement released by the media, announced ten new measures “in order to prevent and control the epidemic more scientifically and accurately and effectively solve outstanding problems in prevention and control work“.
China will further relax the directives on mass swabs and allow asymptomatic and mildly infected people (who make up, on average, about 90% of new daily cases) to be able to quarantine at home; alternatively, it is possible “voluntarily choose centralized isolation for treatment” sanitary.
Furthermore, “with the exception of a few special places,” the note underlines, “negative nucleic acid test certificates are not required and health codes are not checked”, in what appears to be a clear turnaround from the check, via the health app , of the exposure of individual citizens to Covid-19 in force since the beginning of 2020.
The National Commission for Health reiterated the importance of speeding up the process of vaccinating the elderly population – with particular reference to people between 60 and 79 years of age and over-80s, categories in which the vaccination rate is lower – and to optimize lockdowns in places where cases of contagion occur in areas considered to be at high risk of diffusion and to unblock the areas “quickly” in the event of no new infections for five consecutive days.
The note also mentions the ban on blocking the emergency and fire exits of buildings, a measure that appears to be an indirect reference to the death of ten people last month in a residential building in Urumqi, who were unable to leave their their homes for anti-pandemic measures. Schools where cases of contagion occur must in any case “guarantee normal teaching and order of life outside the areas at risk”, which must be delimited “precisely”, we read.
LIVE: China holds news conference on COVID measures https://t.co/ufRvANYgal
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The decisions were announced shortly after the last meeting of the Politburo, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, chaired by Xi Jinping, which focused above all on economic work for next year, but also citing the need to “better coordinate epidemic prevention and control and economic and social development“, according to a statement released by the Xinhua news agency.
China’s u-turn in anti-pandemic measures comes after protests in recent days in many major cities against the lockdowns imposed by the “zero Covid” line to contain the spread of the virus, which was followed by initial relaxation measures health checks in various Chinese cities. In recent days, the state media had already revealed the possibility of a downgrading of the management of the disease at a national level, starting next January – and a relative relaxation of health protocols – by virtue of a weakening of the virus, and a low death rate.