Beijing Capital International Airport will soon be home to a bustling crowd of international visitors again. Starting next Sunday, January 8th, Terminal 2 and 3-E will reopen to welcome back travellers. Since March 2020, China had a strict quarantine policy meant to curb the spread of Covid-19, where passengers arriving in Beijing were required to enter Terminal 3-D of the airport and subsequently spend several days in a designated hotel.
However, on December 26, the National Health Commission of China declared they will lift the quarantine requirement, allowing travellers to come and go without having to request a green health code or go through a mandatory quarantine. The authority also noted Covid-19 will be flaggeg as a Category B illness, which requires fewer control measures.
The increased traffic of travellers is expected to have a positive effect in the air travel industry, whose flight capacity was restricted to less than 5% of pre-pandemic levels in the past two years. This shortage of flights caused a dramatic rise in ticket prices, leading to several protests from travelers.
The move to open up travel lanes to other countries has come with a warning, as China is seeing an upsurge in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks. However, China’s ‘Zero Covid’ policy that put the country under strict lockdowns and performing daily tests of entire urbanizations, among other draconian preventative measures, was ended late in 2022 after much public uproar.
