China announces nationwide loosening of Covid-19 restrictions

The new rules are a major relaxation of President Xi Jinping's signature zero-Covid policy, three years into the pandemic and long after the rest of the world had largely learnt to live with the virus.

Lockdowns — a major source of public anger — will also be limited to as small a scope as is feasible, and authorities are required to free areas that show no positive cases after five days. China will also accelerate the vaccination of the elderly, the health commission said, long seen as a major obstacle to the relaxation zero-Covid.Until recently, Mr Xi and the Chinese propaganda apparatus had hailed zero-Covid as a triumph of communist rule that had kept deaths low compared with democratic countries such as the United States.

All the while, a stream of data showed the massive impacts of zero-Covid on China's economy — with spill-on effects for the world. And once dominated by coverage of the dangers of the virus and scenes of pandemic chaos abroad, China's state-run media dramatically shifted tone to support a moving away from zero-Covid."It's about time to open up, its been three years already, we should open up fully," one Beijing resident who asked to remain anonymous told AFP.

Searches on the country's biggest travel app, Ctrip, for flight tickets ahead of next month's Chinese New Year hit a three-year-high, state-run media outlet The Paper reported.

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