China will lift quarantine requirements for inbound travelers from January 8 as the country dismantles the remnants of a zero-Covid regime that sealed it off from the rest of the world for nearly three years.
The National Health Commission unveiled the move Monday as part of a broader announcement that downgraded the country’s handling of Covid-19, a virus currently sweeping the nation, and finally abandoned a host of other preventive measures.
The NHC said more than 90 percent of cases of the Omicron variant were “mild or asymptomatic,” part of a shift in tone towards coronavirus as it rages in a country that until recently had very few of the 1, 4 billion inhabitants had been infected with it.
The government, which this month also scrapped the requirement to quarantine positive cases in central facilities, is now battling a severe winter outbreak with cases estimated to be in the hundreds of millions and health services under strain.
Models have estimated the virus could kill nearly 1 million people, even though China’s public data no longer reflects the situation on the ground and other zero-Covid rules like mass testing have largely ended.
China adopted a strict zero-Covid policy shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, locking down many of its largest cities for several years and imposing quarantine requirements on foreign arrivals to eliminate the virus within its borders.
Late this year, politics began to unravel as authorities struggled to contain outbreaks in several cities, including the capital Beijing. Protesters took to the streets in November in a rare demonstration of resistance to central government crackdowns, which were dramatically eased shortly thereafter.
Monday’s announcement signals the end of the zero-Covid system that has transformed China’s relationship with the outside world and has long successfully limited transmission of a virus that has engulfed all other advanced economies.
At one point this year, the quarantine arrival rule required travelers to spend three weeks in a hotel room. The current requirement of five days at a hotel followed by three days at home ends on January 8th.
The sudden lifting of restrictions has already put enormous pressure on China’s healthcare system, particularly in Beijing, which was one of the centers of the outbreak prior to the policy’s abandonment and was said to be one of the best prepared cities.
Recent economic data has highlighted the economic costs of policies. Retail sales, a measure of consumer spending, fell 5.9 percent year on year in November, worse than analysts had expected, while the economy is expected to miss the annual growth target of 5.5 percent, already the lowest in decades.
But analysts have also warned of the economic and corporate costs of the virus itself as it sweeps the country, with Apple among those vulnerable to further supply chain problems.
Under zero-Covid, citizens in China had to test at stalls in major cities every few days and then scan a code on their phones to enter buildings. Such practices have largely disappeared as cases surged, although as late as November people were being placed in central quarantine in Shanghai for having close contacts with positive cases in bars.