BEIJING: China on Friday eased some of its strict Covid rules, including shortening quarantines by two days for close contacts of infected people and for inbound travellers, and removing a penalty for airlines for bringing in too many cases.

The loosening of curbs, a day after President Xi Jinping led his new politburo standing committee in a meeting on Covid, cheered markets even as many experts warned that the measures were incremental and reopening probably remained a long way off.

Under the new rules, centralised quarantine times for close contacts and travellers from abroad were shortened from seven to five days. The requirement for three further days in home isolation after centralised quarantine remains.

China will also stop trying to identify “secondary” contacts — a major annoyance for residents of cities who are caught up in sweeping contact-tracing efforts when a case is found — while still identifying close contacts.

“Optimising and adjusting prevention and control measures is not relaxing prevention and control, let alone opening up and `lying flat’, but to adapt to the new situation of epidemic prevention and control and the new characteristics of Covid-19 mutation,” the country’s health commission (NHC) said.

China’s yuan currency extended gains to a seven-week high after the news and the blue chip index rose 2.8 percent in afternoon trade The easing comes even as case numbers in China surge to their highest since April, with Beijing and the central city of Zhengzhou seeing record tallies, and numerous cities widened localised lockdowns and other measures, including in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou.

But Bruce Pang, chief economist at Jones Lang Lasalle, said some interpretations of the new rules and what they might mean for prospects for a full opening were “too optimistic”.

“The Covid policy will only be fine-tuned in the short term,” he said. The news was greeted with both excitement and wariness among Chinese citizens fed up with nearly three years of curbs, which are also taking a mounting toll on the world’s second-largest economy. Travel platform Qunar said search volumes for international flights tripled from the previous day.

Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2022