China eased some of its draconian Covid rules on Nov 11st, including shortening quarantines by two days for close contacts of infected people and for inbound travelers, and removing a penalty for airlines for bringing in too many cases.

Under the new rules, centralized quarantine times for close contacts and travelers from abroad were shortened from seven days to five days. The requirement for three further days in home isolation after centralized quarantine remains.

China will also stop trying to identify “secondary” contacts while still identifying close contacts.

“Optimizing and adjusting prevention and control measures is not relaxing prevention and control, let alone opening up and ‘laying flat,’ but to adapt to the new situation of epidemic prevention and control and the new characteristics of Covid-19 mutation,” the National Health Commission said.

Also, China is adjusting its categorization of Covid risk areas to simply “high” and “low” risk — eliminating the “medium” category, an effort to minimize the number of people coming under control measures.