China says that people who enter the country after January 8 will no longer have to go through a quarantine.
As China moves away from its zero-Covid policy, this is the latest restriction to be removed.
The number of infections caused by Covid is going up in China, and doctors say they can’t keep up.
When President Xi Jinping first talked about the changes, he told officials to do “whatever is possible” to save lives.
He was quoted by state media as saying that the country had new problems that needed a more focused solution.
China has stopped sharing Covid data, but it’s possible that thousands of people die every day.
Starting in March 2020, everyone who enters China will have to go through a centrally located quarantine.
But the time has slowly gotten shorter, going from three weeks to only five days.
Under the new rules, Covid will go from being a Class A disease to a Class B disease. This means putting people in quarantine will no longer be necessary.
Analysts say that Mr. Xi is in a tough spot because China has changed how it deals with the pandemic.
He came up with the zero-Covid policy, which was said to make life too hard for people and hurt the economy.
But because he stopped doing it, he is now responsible for many infections and hospital stays, mostly among older people.
The way people feel about how the president handles the pandemic is one area where he is most at risk.
The media
In a time when there aren’t enough medicines for everyone, the media have also tried to share stories of community spirit.
On Weibo, there are a lot of videos of people putting painkillers they don’t need into bags and giving them to people who do.
People are asked to be nice to hardworking medical staff, and news outlets show how people have been nice to front-line staff.
For example, the news site The Paper wrote about a man who called a government operator in Chengdu while his throat hurt and he was coughing down the phone.
In the last 24 hours, the hashtag #PersistentDoctorsandNursesWorkHard has been used extensively, and state media have praised their work on the front lines.
But the independent South China Morning Post has been reporting that medical students have started new protests for the last week. They want safer conditions and “better pay” on China’s front lines.
The state news has yet to talk about these things. But pictures and videos of protests are often blocked because they show people are unhappy with how things are.
This happened last month when people all over the country protested against the strict Covid-19 rules.
WHO says hospitals in China are at capacity
WHO says hospitals in China seem to be getting full as people worry that a new Covid-19 wave will hit the country.
Dr. Michael Ryan says ICUs are busy, even though officials say the number of people in them is “relatively low.”
No one in China died of Covid on Wednesday, but no one knows how bad the disease is.
As the latest Covid wave hits China, hospitals in Beijing and other cities are packed.
Since 2020, China has had strict health rules as part of its “zero Covid” policy.
But after many people protested against these controls, the government stopped most of them two weeks ago.
Since then, the number of cases has increased, making people worry about a high death rate, especially among older people who are more likely to get sick.
Even though the number of deaths has gone up, the government says that only five died of Covid on Tuesday and two on Monday.
It made Dr. Ryan, in charge of emergencies at the WHO, ask China for more information about the latest virus spread.
The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a weekly news conference in Geneva that he is very worried about how things are going in China.
He asked for details about how bad the disease was, how long he would have to stay in the hospital, and whether or not he would need intensive care.
Dr. Ryan also said that the best way to stop the spread of coronavirus is to get vaccinated.
China made its vaccines, but they don’t keep people from getting sick or dying from Covid, and the mRNA vaccines are used in most of the rest of the world.
His comments came the same day the German government said on Wednesday that it had sent China its first batch of BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines.
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Expats in China will get the German vaccines first. About 20,000 of them are thought to exist.
It is the first time a foreign Covid-19 vaccine has been sent to China, but no one knows how much or when it will arrive.
Olaf Scholz went to Beijing last month and pushed for the Chinese people to get the vaccine for free.
