The 40-day Spring Festival travel rush in China begins on January 7. Passengers are seen at Zhengzhou East Railway Station in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan province. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By Staff Reporters

China released its 10th Edition of COVID-19 control protocol on January 7, highlighting vaccination and personal protection.

Released by the State Council joint COVID-19 prevention and control mechanism, the protocol encourages the public, especially the elderly, to get fully vaccinated and take booster shots. It also stresses good hygiene habits such as washing hands frequently and wearing masks to strengthen personal protection.

Mass nucleic acid testing will no longer be carried out, but antigen or nucleic acid testing will be conducted for relevant people seeking medical treatment and inpatients at hospitals, staff or care recipients at aged care facilities and social welfare institutions, and people at high risk of serious illness in communities, says the protocol.

It proposes that temporary prevention and control measures should be taken timely, while quarantine measures against people with a COVID-19 infection are dropped, and in accordance with the law to reduce large gatherings as well as the flow of people, to alleviate the impact of the sudden increase of infected people on social functioning and medical resources. 

China's Spring Festival travel rush, the largest annual human migration worldwide, kicked off the same day.

According to an official press conference, the number of passenger trips during this year's Spring Festival travel rush is expected to surge 99.5 percent from the same period last year to reach nearly 2.1 billion.

Regional railway operators have decided to put extra trains into service to meet the robust demand, following a major shift of the country's rules of COVID-19 response.

With regards to COVID-19 containment during this mass seasonal migration, the State Council has taken steps to minimize the impact of the virus on every link of the Spring Festival transport, with priority given to the medical supplies for transport workers.

The country will equip public transport hubs and long-distance trains with more emergency medicines, and public transport operators are also required to increase backups for key personnel such as drivers and dispatchers, step up the cross-regional transfer of manpower, and rotate work schedules to brace for staff shortages caused by virus infection, according to the State Council.