Some Chinese universities indicated they would allow students to finish the semester from home, hoping to reduce the potential for a larger outbreak of COVID-19 during the Lunar New Year travel campaign in January.

It was not clear how many schools were participating, but universities in Shanghai and nearby cities said students would have the option of returning home soon or staying on campus and getting tested every 48 hours. Lunar New Year, which falls on January 22 this year, is traditionally China’s busiest travel season.

In the last three years, universities have suffered frequent lockdowns, which have sometimes led to clashes between authorities and students confined to the campus or even to their rooms in residences.

China has begun to relax its tough “zero COVID” strategy, now allowing the sick without severe symptoms to stay at home instead of going to quarantine centers, among other changes introduced after widespread protests.

The authorities stopped registering the movements of the population as of Tuesday, which could reduce the chances that people will be forced to quarantine for visiting areas of concentration of infections. However, China’s international borders remained closed for the most part and no deadlines have been announced for lifting restrictions on travelers arriving from abroad and Chinese citizens who want to leave the country.

The government abruptly announced last week that it was ending many of the toughest measures, after three years in which it imposed some of the toughest virus protocols in the world.

Protests broke out in Beijing and other cities last month that led to calls for the resignation of President Xi Jinping and the country’s ruling Communist Party, a level of public dissent not seen in decades.

Although welcomed with relief, the lifting of the measures has also raised fears of a new wave of infections that could overwhelm medical resources in some areas.

Many people were staying at home, and the central streets of Beijing looked unusually quiet on Tuesday. There were short lines outside clinics for fever patients – which have grown from 94 to 303 – and at pharmacies, where cold and flu medicines have become harder to find.

Many mainland Chinese residents have begun ordering medicines from pharmacies in Hong Kong, which has already relaxed many restrictions.

The government of the semi-autonomous city went a step further on Tuesday, saying it would remove restrictions on travelers arriving from abroad, which until now prevented them from eating in restaurants or going to bars in their first three days of stay. It will also stop using its contact tracing app, although the vaccination requirements to enter venues such as restaurants will remain. The changes would go into effect on Wednesday.

Although the withdrawal of controls in the Chinese mainland meant a sharp drop in the mandatory tests from which the daily infection figures were obtained, the cases seemed to rise rapidly and many people were tested at home, without going through the hospital.

China reported 7,451 new infections on Monday, bringing the country’s total to 372,763, more than double the number on October 1. The country has reported 5,235 deaths, compared with 1.1 million deaths in the United States.

The figures provided by the Chinese government have not been independently verified and doubts have been raised as to whether the Communist Party has tried to downplay the numbers of cases and deaths.

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