Chinese cities reduce mass testing as nation eases Covid measures

Some Chinese cities reduced mass Covid testing following authorities’ announcement of sweeping changes to ease control measures, even as the national case tally continued to climb.

Sanya in the southern island of Hainan canceled a city-wide testing scheduled for Saturday, and instead asked residents to make their own arrangements to get tested once every three days, according to a notice posted by the local government late Friday. Fuzhou in the southeastern province of Fujian suspended daily mass testings in five districts for four days from Saturday, according to an official notice.

The fine-tuning of local policy came after China on Friday reduced the amount of time travelers and close contacts of virus cases must spend in quarantine, in a significant calibration of the Covid Zero policy that has upended the world’s second-largest economy. Among a list of 20 guidelines for local officials, mass testing is to be conducted only when the source of infection is unknown.

China reported that new local cases rose to 11,323 for Friday, after daily infections climbed above 10,000 for the first time since April on the previous day. Much of the surge came from the southern metropolis Guangzhou, where new cases jumped to 3,180 from 2,583 on Thursday. Chongqing in southwestern China reported 1,240 new infections, up from 782.

Many local governments also heeded the latest instruction to re-categorize “high-risk” areas that are placed under more stringent mobility curbs. The national guideline asked local authorities to narrow the scope of high-risk areas to resident units or blocks, and to remove the “medium” risk category. 

Zhengzhou in central China, for example, released an updated list of high-risk areas, many of which were narrowed to specific building units. It wasn’t immediately clear whether residents in areas that are no longer categorized as high or medium risk were already released from quarantine.

Guangzhou is taking steps to release from isolation close contacts of Covid close contacts as the guideline required, local government officials said in a press briefing Friday. 

However, public venues in Beijing are tightening Covid control requirement as an outbreak continues to spread in the city. An increasing number of venues now require a negative Covid test result generated within the past 24 hours for visitors to enter. Beijing’s new local infections were unchanged at 114 on Friday from a day earlier.