China’s health authorities announced sweeping changes to the country’s “zero COVID” policies on Wednesday, about a week after rare nationwide protests against draconian pandemic controls that separated families, forced people to quarantine outside their homes and appeared to be having mounting social and economic costs.
The National Health Commission published a 10-point memo detailing a series of measures rolling back some of the anti-COVID-19 restrictions.
Among the highlights: harsh lockdowns will be limited to targeted areas, such as a particular building or floor, as opposed to whole neighborhoods and districts; people who test positive for the virus can isolate at home rather than in overcrowded field hospitals; and schools can stay open if there is an infection, provided there isn’t a wider outbreak.
Many testing requirements have also been scrapped.
“Relevant departments in all localities must further … and resolutely correct the ‘one size fits all’ simplified approach,” the commission said in a statement posted on its website.
Previous coverage:Why are there protests in China right now? Anger mounts over country’s ‘zero-Covid policy’
For the duration of the pandemic, now entering its fourth year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s strict – and controversial – virus policies have been blamed for upending ordinary life, travel and employment while dealing a harsh blow to the national economy.
“Those not employed by the state have been hit particularly hard by zero-COVID measures. The strategy has intensified economic pressures, exacerbated rising levels of youth unemployment, and tested the patience of the entire country,” Yu Jie, a China expert at London think thank Chatham House, wrote in a recent opinion piece.
“Zero-COVID was once a signature policy to demonstrate the supremacy of China’s governance system and to meet the public expectation of pandemic control, but it has now left Beijing between a rock and a hard place,” she said.
Increasingly, this approach stood in sharp contrast to anti-virus actions taken by most other countries, which have opened up in hopes of learning to live with the virus.
The recent protests were the largest-scale public expression of anger and resentment with China’s government since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. They were triggered by a combination of rising public frustration with “zero-COVID” and a fire in a residential apartment building in western China that killed at least 10 people. Some residents later blamed lockdown procedures for preventing emergency responders from entering the building sooner, an allegation that Chinese authorities denied.
Story Credit: usatoday.com