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China will remove capacity limits for performance and entertainment venues in low-risk areas of COVID-19, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT) noticed on its website Monday. According to the notice, local governments can decide on their capacity of consumers in these venues according to their COVID-19 situation.
In Beijing, from Tuesday, people from low-risk regions in the Chinese mainland don’t need to provide a seven-day negative nucleic acid test result when they arrive in Beijing. Besides, arrivals also no longer need to undergo a 14-day quarantine, two nucleic acid tests after seven and 14 days respectively after their arrival. The recent moves gesture that the country is further relaxing its COVID-19 containment restrictions as the epidemic is largely contained across the country and the weather is going warmer. Prior to the notice of the MCT, many regions across China have already relaxed their control measures, but experts warned that as the vaccination rate is still low, which stands at less than four percent currently, people should keep vigilant to the virus threat.
So far, over 67.9 million people on the mainland have been vaccinated, according to the NHC officials on Monday. The country is accelerating its effort to inoculate the population, aiming to inoculate 40 percent of its 1.4 billion people by the end of June, according to Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese respiratory disease expert at an online forum held by Tsinghua University and the Brookings Institution on March 1. Besides, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that based on China’s current vaccine production capability, the country would be able to inoculate 70 to 80 percent of its population by the middle of next year. That is 900 million to one billion populations, a big challenge that will test China’s industrial might. According to Yu Qingming, Chairman of Sinopharm Group Co. Ltd on March 3, the production capacity of the COVID-19 vaccine is expected to reach more than one billion doses this year. And with the continuous expansion of production capacity, the annual capacity is expected to reach three billion doses next year.
Besides, Yin Weidong, the chairman of Sinovac Biotech Co. Ltd, said in January that the company’s production capacity could reach one billion this year. Aside from the two companies, the other two companies –CanSino Biologics Inc. and Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd are also producing their COVID-19 vaccines. The CanSino Biologics Inc., together with the Academy of Military Sciences, has developed an adenovirus vector vaccine for COVID-19, while Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd., assisted by the Institute of Microbiology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a recombinant subunit vaccine for COVID-19. CanSino Biologics’s president Yu Xuefeng said at the end of last year that its annual production could reach 100 to 200 million doses. While the production capacity of Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd can reach 300 million doses annually, according to its official statement last year. So far, aside from the recombinant subunit vaccine developed by Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd, other mentioned vaccines have been approved by the National Medical Products Administration for public use and are accelerating to expand their production.
“Chinese vaccine manufacturers are still expanding, and with the continuous release of production capacity, the output will gradually increase,” Tian Yulong, an official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told reporters at a news briefing on Monday. On Monday, the Chinese mainland recorded 13 new COVID-19 cases, and all are from overseas. So far, the country has recorded 90,062 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with the death toll unchanged at 4,636, according to the National Health Commission (NHC).
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