End to daily testing of students on campus

Students take temperature checks at a local school.

Shanghai students will be subject to nucleic acid tests every other day on campus, rather than daily as previously, the city government announced on Sunday in a series of optimized COVID-19 prevention and control measures.

Primary and secondary schools as well as kindergartens and childcare facilities in Shanghai should conduct polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The testing requirements can be further optimized or adjusted according to the COVID situation, the city government said on its official WeChat account Shanghaifabu.

The directive was announced following the new COVID measures released by China's State Council, or the Cabinet, on Friday to enhance the precision of COVID-19 prevention and control, while reducing the influence on economic and social development.

In another new measure, the city government said generally no mass screening of a whole local district will be carried out, only if the origin of infection or the transmission chain remained unclear, along with long-term community transmission.

The routine PCR testing and community screening will be better organized.

The city government affirmed it will implement other optimized COVID prevention and control measures of the State Council, such as to shorten the quarantine period for inbound travelers and close contacts to five days in central quarantine, followed by three days of home quarantine.

Secondary close contacts, or the close contacts to the COVID-19 contacts, will no longer be identified, while COVID medium-risk areas will be scrapped.

If no cases are found in a high-risk area for five consecutive days, the area will be considered as low risk.

The new directive also describes positive among inbound travelers as CT, or cycle threshold, values below 35.