Beijing the China’s capital is opening up to international travel after the six months following the COVID-19 pandemic, with an official announcement saying that flights from eight countries, including its “all-weather ally” Pakistan, would be permitted from Thursday.
On 23March, Beijing has banned all the international flights but on Wednesday it announced plans to resume the direct international flights beginning from Thursday, signalling that the pandemic has been contained in the city.
Flights connecting Thailand, Cambodia and Pakistan in Asia; Greece, Denmark, Austria and Sweden in Europe and Canada in North America — countries with relatively small numbers of imported cases — will resume.
The first direct international flight to Beijing will depart from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh on Thursday which will be operated by Air China.
China is gradually permitting few flights from different countries, including the US to Shanghai and other cities mainly to bring back its stranded citizens abroad.
After a long break, Beijing airports will be open again to welcome passengers from eight countries directly into the city, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said.
Since March, all international flights bound for Beijing have been rerouted to other Chinese cities, in a bid to prevent the imported cases of coronavirus.
All the international passengers who would be entering Beijing will be quarantine for 14 days and will be under medical observation and will take nucleic acid tests twice a week, says Beijing health authority spokesman Gao Xiaojun in a press conference which took place on Wednesday.
For 26 consecutive days, Beijing reported no single new Covid cases as per the local health authorities.
It does not mean, however, that Beijing — or other cities in the country could relax their prevention and control measures, as China has been seeing growing numbers of imported cases in recent months, according to some experts.
With the experience of dealing with resurgent outbreaks in cities like Beijing and Dalian of northeast China”s Liaoning province, China is increasingly capable of handling imported cases, and COVID-19 prevention and control has become a regular task, Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times.
