All international arrivals entering Beijing will now have to complete an additional week of home observation on top of the 14 days of centralized or home quarantine already required for returnees. The deputy secretary-general of the Beijing municipal government announced the new regulations at a press conference on Tuesday, adding that incomers must also designate a ‘health monitoring contact person.’
To be sure, the country’s borders still remain closed to foreigners. Nevertheless, given that 9th and 12th graders will be returning to the classroom next Monday (Apr 27), all of the students and faculty currently stuck abroad will be eager to come back as soon as they’re allowed. Unfortunately however, given the new rules, it will be a full 21 days between landing in Beijing and walking onto campus.
Other than the need to provide daily health checks and the inability to leave the house, the exact requirements for those under home observation were not outlined during the press conference. It was stated however that individual requirements would be communicated to the person via text message, presumably upon the completion of their two-week stint in state quarantine.
As officials reiterated at the end of March, all people who enter the greater Beijing area must undergo quarantine, without exception. Whether returnees are quarantined in a centralized location or at home is dependent on the returnee’s community, their age, or preexisting health conditions.
The change follows a mid-April case in Shuangjing, in which a returnee completed two weeks of quarantine, tested negative for COVID-19 with a nucleic acid test, but fell ill two days after returning home. The returnee then infected three other members of the household and forced over 60 ‘close contacts’ to redo their quarantine. This also resulted in Chaoyang District being classified as a high-risk zone.
Most experts estimate that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 may incubate in the body for one to 14 days before symptoms appear, averaging an incubation period of five days. However, as the aforementioned returnee shows, the virus may be carried asymptomatically for even longer in some rare cases.
In addition to a growing number of cases in South Korea that have shown patients may not always attain immunity after recovery – a phenomenon that could either be caused by reinfection or from remnants of the virus resulting in false positives – cases like this illustrate just how little we know about the disease, which is why extra precautions are still being taken.
This article first appeared in our sister publication the Beijinger.
Photos: Sarah McCutcheon (via Unsplash)
