Authorities of Beijing Municipality announced plans to resume international flights from some countries directly to one of Beijing’s two international airports. Since March 23, flights with destination Beijing were diverted to other cities, such as Xian and Qingdao, were passengers were required to disembark, pass several Covid-19 tests and stay 14 days in quarantine, before boarding flights to their final destination of Beijing. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) announced that in a first batch, direct flights from eight countries would be welcomed: Thailand, Cambodia, Pakistan, Greece, Denmark, Austria, Sweden and Canada. The first direct international flight to Beijing departed from Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, on September 3 and was operated by Air China.

“Resuming direct international flight signals that China has gotten domestic Covid-19 outbreaks under control. Though there have been small-scale resurgences, they all have been quickly contained and eradicated,” Zeng Guang, former Chief Epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times. The latest outbreak of Covid-19 cases in Beijing ended on July 20 and the city has reported no new case for more than a month. 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.

Passengers arriving in Beijing from overseas need to be quarantined for 14 days and take nucleic acid tests twice. Ditan Hospital in Beijing was designated for treatment of those who test positive. In order to control the cross-border spread of the global pandemic, the CAAC said that it would impose stricter anti-Covid-19 prevention measures based on the existing “circuit breaker” mechanism. The regulator stressed that if three or more confirmed cases are found on an international flight into Beijing, the flight will be re-directed to another Chinese city. During trial operations, direct international flights to Beijing will have a passenger cap of around 500 each day in the beginning and this will be gradually raised to 1,000 after a test run. The total number of arriving flights should be no more than five daily. The passengers should be citizens of those foreign countries or Chinese people who are traveling back from those countries. People from third countries are not allowed to the direct flights. Beijing residents returning from those countries via direct flights will need to have another 7-day health monitoring period at home after the 14-day quarantine, said Tian Tao, responsible for community epidemic control in the city’s anti-virus work group.

“If we want to become a metropolis with a certain role and influence in the world, we must restore international communication. The flight resumption also shows that Beijing is back on track,” Sheng Guangyao, Research Fellow at the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies of the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times. “We need to strike a balance between normalizing epidemic prevention and moving on,” said Sheng.

Wuhan, in Hubei province, will resume international flights in mid-September after a seven-month suspension, officials said. Several foreign carriers have applied to restart flights linking Wuhan to Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Hanoi, Sihanoukville, Tokyo, Jakarta and Singapore. The number of international flights operated by Chinese airlines is still only 10% of the number in the same period last year. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that global passenger demand in July (measured in revenue passenger kilometers or RPKs), continued to be critically low – 79.8% below July 2019 levels. Chinese carriers’ traffic was down 28.4% compared to July 2019.

Frontline aviation personnel will be among the first to be vaccinated, the CAAC said, but emergency vaccine use will only be given to volunteers aged 18 to 59. It has not been announced which vaccine they will receive. China National Biotec Group (CNBG) and Sinovac Biotech presented their Covid-19 vaccines at the opening ceremony of the CIFTIS services exhibition. Sinovac’s designed production capacity for the vaccine is 300 million doses annually. It takes 40 days for the company to produce one dose of the vaccine. CNBG is upgrading its manufacturing techniques to expand its production capacity from 200 million doses per year to 300 million doses per year, and eventually to 1 billion doses. The vaccines are expected to hit the market in December. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), phase Ⅲ clinical trials of eight candidate vaccines had kicked off as of September 3 with half of the candidates being developed by Chinese companies.

A ceremony was held in Beijing on September 8 to honor individuals and groups who fought against the Covid-19 epidemic. President Xi Jinping conferred the Medal of the Republic, the highest civilian honor, on respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan; and the national honorary title “The People’s Hero” on vaccine developer General Chen Wei, traditional Chinese medicine expert Zhang Boli and Director of the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital Zhang Dingyu.