After New Year, China will remove the quarantine requirement for entry, which has caused Chinese people to celebrate on social media and rush for travel and visas.

The Chinese reacted with joy and immediately started booking trips abroad after Beijing announced on Monday that the quarantine requirement for entry, which has lasted for almost three years, will disappear after New Year.

China unexpectedly announced late Monday that starting January 8, 2023, incoming travelers will no longer be required to undergo a minimum two-week quarantine. The announcement was another ingredient in the Communist Party's abrupt U-turn on Covid, with travel restrictions lifted and lockdowns lifted.

On Chinese social media, users reacted with joy to the enforced quarantine requirements that have essentially kept the country closed to the outside world since March 2020.

”It's over... now spring is coming,” was a popular comment on the social media service Weibo.

Web searches for overseas flights skyrocketed after the announcement, state media reported. Searches on travel platform Tongcheng increased by 850 percent and inquiries about various visas increased tenfold.

Since China changed its COVID policy, the spread of the virus in the country has skyrocketed, according to several consistent reports. According to some estimates, up to a million Chinese citizens are at risk of dying from COVID-19 in the coming months.

Officially, 90 percent of the country's 1.4 billion inhabitants have been vaccinated, but only 60 percent have received a second dose and it is mainly the younger, working generations who have been vaccinated.

Source: TT-DI.SE