China Ends Covid-19 Travel Curbs For Incoming Passengers From Today

China will lift its quarantine requirement for inbound travellers starting from January 8. It will also resume issuing visas for residents to travel overseas.

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New Delhi:  China will lift its quarantine requirement for inbound travellers starting from January 8. It will also resume issuing visas for residents to travel overseas. China's immigration authorities have said that they will start receiving applications for issuing passports for tourism and visits abroad beginning January 8, NHK World reported. Chinese media had said that access to major online travel sites for bookings to popular destinations, including Japan and Thailand increased ten-fold after the government's announcement, according to the NHK World report.

Meanwhile, China has imposed a ban on such agencies from accepting bookings of group tours and giving sales of package tours, according to NHK World. China will lift the travel restrictions from January 8, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said on Wednesday.

Earlier, China announced plans to ease border restrictions and resume overseas visits in an orderly manner as per the international Covid-19 situation. According to Global Times, the CAAC said that it will resume international passenger traffic. According to the new policies released, China will stop designating inbound high-risk flights and call an end to the 75 percent restriction for passenger capacity on inbound flights.

Chinese and foreign airlines will arrange scheduled passenger flights in line with bilateral agreements. The CAAC said that it will gradually resume applications for chartered international passenger flights, according to The Global Times report. It will also cancel measures impacting inbound flights, including closed-loop management of domestic and overseas crews, Covid testing, and quarantine.

China’s State Council joint prevention and control mechanism against Covid-19 issued the 10th edition of the Covid-19 prevention and control protocol on Saturday, as reported by The Global Times. The protocol was issued in accordance with the decision of downgrading the epidemic management from Class A to Class B, highlighting the monitoring of mutated variants and early warning as well as the protection of key groups by preventing severe cases.

The new version of the epidemic prevention and control plan advocates increased vaccination and self-protection, calling for enhancing the monitoring of new variants and using the national influenza surveillance network. 554 national influenza surveillance sentinel hospitals are required to carry out influenza-like illness (ILI) and severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) surveillance, according to the national influenza surveillance network, The Global Times reported.

The guidelines require hospitals to enhance medical resources for treating severe cases by accelerating and upgrading ICU units to ensure that the number of comprehensive ICU beds used for the treatment of various critically ill patients infected with Covid-19 is no less than 4 percent of the total number of beds opened in the hospital.

Hospitals are also required to reserve an area of beds that could be transferred to ICU beds within 24 hours, which should not be less than 4 percent of the total beds opened. ICU beds should not be less than 10 percent of the total beds, The Global Times reported citing the guidelines.

(With agencies’ Inputs)