The Chinese reacted with glee and immediately began booking trips abroad after Beijing announced on Monday that the quarantine requirement for entry, which has lasted for almost three years, will disappear after the New Year.
Completely unexpectedly, China announced late on Monday that starting January 8, 2023, travelers will no longer have to spend at least two weeks in quarantine. The message was another ingredient in the Communist Party’s sharp u-turn regarding covid with claimed travel restrictions and an end to lockdowns.
Happy reactions
On Chinese social media, users reacted with glee to the claimed quarantine requirements that have basically kept the country closed to the outside world since March 2020.
“It’s over… now spring is coming,” was a popular comment on the social media service Weibo.
Web searches for air travel abroad skyrocketed after the announcement, state media reports. Searches on the Tongcheng travel platform increased by 850 percent and questions regarding various visas increased tenfold.
Increased spread
After China changed its covid policy, the spread of infection in the country has skyrocketed according to several consistent reports. According to some estimates, up to one million Chinese citizens are at risk of dying from covid-19 in the coming months.
Officially, 90 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion inhabitants have been vaccinated, but only 60 percent have received a second dose and it is mainly the younger, working generations who have been vaccinated.