China on Friday (Nov 11) relaxed several COVID measures for international travelers. The changes relate to flight bans, testing, and quarantine times.
Under the new rules, International arrivals now need to quarantine for eight days instead of ten, while officials will no longer record secondary contacts for tracing – allowing many to avoid quarantine, also scrapped a penalty for international airlines bringing in virus cases into the country
The National Health Council (NHC) announced that the centralized quarantine times for close contacts and travelers from abroad were shortened from seven to five days. The requirement for three further days in home isolation after centralized quarantine remains.
“Passengers of inbound flights to China will only need to provide one negative nucleic acid testing result within 48 hours instead of two,” according to the report published by official media.
Among the new measures is an adjustment of categorization of COVID-19 risk areas to “high” and “low” – eliminating a “medium” category in a bid to minimize the number of people caught up in control measures.
The new steps include ending a “circuit breaker”, under which airlines faced a suspension of flights if they brought in too many COVID-infected passengers, a system that caused frequent cancellations. Still, international flights remain at a small fraction of pre-COVID levels.
