China will stop requiring covid tests to enter supermarkets after the blank folios protests

After the protests, China continues to take small steps that point to a relaxation of the strict anti-pandemic measures that have governed the lives of 1.4 billion people since the beginning of 2020. This Tuesday, the authorities of the city of Beijing decided to allow access to some public places, such as supermarkets, shopping centers, offices and airports, without the need to show the negative result of a PCR test.

The measure eliminates a requirement that had become a daily nuisance for millions of people, by forcing citizens to queue in front of one of the hundreds of kiosks scattered along the sidewalks throughout the city destined to carry out thousands of daily acid tests. nucleic.

Since Monday, a negative result has not been requested to take the metro and the bus.

The new standard is just one more step that sets a trend.

For the moment, it is still necessary to scan the ubiquitous QR code system at the entrances to these places with the mobile phone —a measure to locate people at all times, so that an outbreak can be traced—;

and a negative PCR is also still required to access a good handful of places such as bars, nurseries and schools (many of which, by the way, are still closed in Beijing, which is navigating a wave of infections of unknown proportions).

But these new rules adopted in the country's capital, similar to those that have already been adopted in other large cities such as Shanghai, and added to the relaxation of confinements in cities such as Guangzhou,

Already last week, with the revolt of the blank pages headed under a strong police deployment in Shanghai (origin of the demonstrations) and Beijing (where the reply was felt strongly) a very rapid mutation was perceived in the official discourse, when Sun Chunlan, the vice minister in charge of the battle against the coronavirus, also known as "the czarina of covid zero", assured that the country was facing "a new situation" in this fight.

The scenario, Sun said, has changed "as the pathogenicity of the omicron virus weakens, more people are vaccinated, and experience in containing the virus accumulates."

This change had already begun to take place in part with the launch almost a month ago of a battery of 20 guidelines to "optimize", in the words of the Chinese government, the anti-pandemic policy.

Among them was the reduction of quarantine periods for close contacts and the acceleration of vaccination of the elderly, one of China's weak points in the face of an eventual reopening.

wave of infections

Meanwhile, the Chinese capital is experiencing a strange moment.

After having kept the virus at bay for more than three years, the city is still immersed in an unprecedented wave of infections.

Many of its inhabitants discover with perplexity that they are beginning to know directly one or even several people who have the covid at this time, when until recently, if one asked anyone if they had a family member or friend who had had the coronavirus , the usual was a negative answer.

The use of rapid antigen tests to self-detect the disease is widespread.

People are allowed to quarantine at home instead of being forced to move to isolation centers.

Uncharted territory is being treaded on several fronts:

At this time, the numbers of infections continue to ride a wave that has broken the country's records;

the wave has already reached its zenith, but his tail still stretches out in time.

This Tuesday, the Chinese health authorities have reported just over 4,600 new infections in the capital and nearly 28,000 cases in the country.

The scourge of infections is being borne in any case in a very different spirit from previous outbreaks, as the propaganda organs insist on downplaying the new variant of covid.

"Experts say that the possibility of [developing] severe illness or death from omicron is low," headlines this Tuesday in one of its main articles the newspaper owned by the communist party

.

In recent days, online drug platforms, pharmacies and drug manufacturers have reported increased sales, according to Reuters.

The JD Health sales platform ensures that sales of antigen analysis equipment shot up 344% last week compared to the previous week.

“It is time for the Chinese to treat covid-19 like the flu,” Hu Xijin, an analyst of postulates close to the government, who in recent days has become a vanguard defender of the sudden Beijing's change of position.

"The response to the covid has been drastically adjusted in many parts of China and within a short time people will be able to travel throughout the country without many restrictions," he stressed.

"People's minds are changing along with policy adjustments."

Follow all the international information on

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber