During Sunday’s COVID-19 press conference, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of Beijing’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sought to address the growing anxiety facing families who are required to quarantine in separate hotel rooms upon their return to China.
According to data collected from clusters of infections, it was found that family members who had close contact with a COVID-19 carrier are more than five times as likely to contract the disease, when compared with those who had minimal exposure to an infected person in public. Likewise, the rate of transmission amongst family members is 17%, while transmission in other social settings has hovered around 3%.
Put another way, the overwhelming majority of new infections, up to 86%, are occurring in family clusters, with seven being the largest number of infections to hit a single family unit thus far.
All of this comes as expats and locals continue flying in from other parts of the world, and China has imposed a mandatory 14-day quarantine period on returnees, the vast majority of which are taking place in government-sanctioned hotels.
Given that the rate of infections within families is alarmingly high, Beijing’s CDC has restricted the number of people allowed in any given hotel room. As of Mar 24, all arrivals from abroad must first go to a centralized isolation observation point for nucleic acid testing. From there, families will be transferred to a government quarantine facility where parents and children over 15 years old must quarantine alone. However, minors aged 14 and below and pregnant women (as well as people aged 70 and above and those with underlying health conditions) will be permitted to quarantine at home should they test negative. Individuals will be quarantined until the results of the test have been processed. The report did not outline how children under 14 are expected to return home alone.
Additionally, this process may also be contingent upon which country the family is flying in from, and whether they’re granted approval to quarantine at home from their local community. For instance, it may be that a family returning from a country defined as “high-risk” by the Chinese government finds it difficult to be granted the right to home quarantine from all the relevant parties.
Being separated from loved ones will be tough on any family, and as with all things COVID-19, the decision to place families in different hotel rooms is not one that Beijing’s CDC made lightly. However given the facts and figures surrounding rates and methods of transmission, measures such as this are imperative if China is to mitigate the rise of new infections, and keep families healthy and safe in the long run.
Photos: runnyrem (via Unsplash)
