China is mulling whether to further shorten the quarantine period and impose more precise anti-epidemic restrictions, as part of its efforts to optimize the COVID-19 response, health authorities said on Thursday amid Omicron BA.5 subvariant-dominated outbreaks in at least 20 Chinese provinces and regions.
Observers viewed it as a positive signal to adjust its anti-epidemic measures in a more science-based way so as to fit the changing epidemic situation. "One-size-fits-all" measures in some regions that have led to "adding additional barriers to anti-virus policies" will be further scrapped to reach a better balance among epidemic control, maintaining people's lives and economic growth, they believed.
"We will continue to collect and study new problems and difficulties that locals are facing in dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks in following the ninth COVID-19 prevention playbook, such as whether the quarantine period can be further shortened and low-risk areas can be more precisely classified… so as to further update and improve the anti-epidemic measures to minimize the impact of the epidemic prevention and control measures on China's economic and social development and people's lives," Wang Liping, a research fellow at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), said during a Thursday press briefing.
Wang said that building better coordination among provinces on identifying people carrying a COVID-19 risk so as to reduce risks of trans-regional transmission is being studied.
Commenting on these fresh actions, virologist Jin Dongyan from Hong Kong University told the Global Times on Thursday that "it's good to see China's dynamic zero-COVID policy has always been dynamically adjusted as the epidemic situation changes. It is definitely more science-based."
If infected cases can be more easily tracked and quarantined, it is possible to shorten their quarantine period to three days at the minimum, Jin noted.
He explained that neither BA.4 nor BA.5 show any big difference from other subvariants in terms of incubation periods. But data proves that most infected cases with BA.4 or BA.5 are prone to infect others within three days after a positive test, which means it is possible to shorten the quarantine period to three days at a minimum.
