China’s top health officials said a sweeping overhaul to its Covid Zero playbook was a refinement of rules and not a relaxation of controls, dismissing interpretations that the changes were a step towards living with the virus.

Officials brandished data that showed cutting centralised quarantine for travellers and close contacts to five days would still catch the vast majority of Covid-19 infections, but said a strict attitude towards stamping out infections remains China’s guiding principle.

The changes, which include reining in mass testing and banning local officials from overzealous lockdowns, come from “a better understanding of the virus, and better research and development of vaccines,” deputy head of the National Health Commission (NHC) Lei Haichao said on Saturday.

Still, they did not rule out a further easing of the rules. When asked about shuttering centralised quarantine camps, Wang Liping, a researcher at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said China’s Covid-19 playbook would continue to be guided by science. Later, Lei reiterated that the government would “keep advancing in small steps”.

The messaging came as a clear riposte to market euphoria over the 20 new measures to guide Covid-19 control, the announcement of which sent Chinese assets surging on Friday as investors cheered a potential shift away from the virus approach that’s exacting a growing social and economic toll.

“I have to emphasise in particular that strict Covid-19 prevention and control and the optimising measures must be combined and implemented at the same time,” Chang Jile, deputy director of the NHC’s Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control, said at the briefing.

China’s large population and other factors mean it can’t “lie flat” like other nations, the officials said. There is still a “significant gap” between the medical resources China has and those in developed countries, Lei said, adding that the country has fewer than four intensive care beds for every 100,000 people.

Chang said the new measures were made after assessing figures to ensure virus-spreading risks will be controllable. He said that only about three in 100,000 contacts of Covid-19 close contacts test positive, a “very low” chance, and the cut of isolation time can save 30% of centralised quarantine resources.

Change has come quickly on the ground across China as cities reduced mass Covid-19 testing and released people from quarantine camps according to the new guidelines, even as the national caseload continued to rise.

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-categorise “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.

However, public venues in Beijing are tightening Covid-19 control requirements as an outbreak continues to spread in the city. An increasing number of venues now require a negative Covid-19 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.

AE News