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During the COVID-19 press conference on Mar 22, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of Beijing’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sought to address the growing anxiety among families who are required to quarantine in separate hotel rooms upon their return to China.
According to data collected from clusters of infections, it was found that family members who had close contact with a COVID-19 carrier are over five times more likely to contract the disease when compared to those who have had minimal exposure to an infected person in public. Likewise, the rate of transmission among family members is 17 percent, while transmission in other social settings is around 3 percent.
Put another way, the overwhelming majority of new infections – up to 86 percent – are occurring in family clusters, with one single-family unit noting seven infections, the largest seen so far.
Given that the rate of infections within families is alarmingly high, Beijing’s CDC has restricted the number of people allowed in any given hotel room. As of Mar 24, all arrivals from abroad must first go to a centralized isolation observation point for nucleic acid testing. From there, families will be transferred to a government quarantine facility where parents and children over 15 years old must quarantine alone. However, minors aged 14 and below and pregnant women (as well as people aged 70 and above and those with underlying health conditions) will be permitted to quarantine at home should they test negative. Individuals will be quarantined until the results of the test have been processed. The report did not outline how children under 14 are expected to return home alone.
Additionally, this process may also be contingent upon which country the family is flying in from, and whether they're granted approval to quarantine at home from their local community. For instance, it may be that a family returning from a country defined as "high-risk" by the Chinese government finds it difficult to be granted the right to home quarantine from all the relevant parties.
READ: Mandatory Nucleic Acid Tests for International Arrivals: What to Expect
This post originally appeared on our sister site beijingkids.
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