Japan media with the report (conveying Bloomberg info):
- China officials have now decided that infections among close contacts already corralled into isolation facilities don’t pose a high risk. The new metric to watch is the number of cases found among people who aren’t yet in quarantine. It’s when that metric — known as “zero infection in society” in Chinese — falls to zero that China considers an outbreak contained.
- The revamped goal means lockdown measures can start being eased once zero community spread has been achieved, even if there are still high numbers of infections detected every day among those in isolation facilities.
- That’s what happened in recent Chinese outbreaks in the tech hub Shenzhen and the northern province Jilin, where curbs were eased before daily case numbers tapered off. It’s also likely how the situation in Shanghai will play out,
This change should ease strains on the economy compared with the more stringent previous lockdown approach. At the margin at least.
