Nurses prepare medicine at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, December 27, 2022. /CFP

Starting from January 8, China will downgrade management of COVID-19 from Class A to Class B in accordance with the country's law on prevention and treatment of infectious disease, said a statement released by the National Health Commission on Monday. 

According to the document, the monitoring objective is to timely and dynamically understand the incidence level and changing trend of infection, and scientifically judge and predict the scale, intensity and time of the epidemic. 

The monitoring program is also aimed at dynamically analyzing the variation of virus strains and their impact on transmission, pathogenicity, immune escape ability and detection reagent sensitivity to provide technical support for epidemic prevention and control. 

The document asks medical institutions at all levels to dynamically analyze the changing trends of severe cases, critical cases, and death cases. For severe cases, critical cases, death cases and special cases, medical institutions should conduct epidemiological investigations in a timely manner and upload relevant epidemiological reports. 

The document also asks local governments to carry out epidemic monitoring based on sentinel hospitals of the National Influenza Surveillance Network, including collecting and reporting daily numbers of patients with respiratory symptoms and people who tested positive for COVID-19, reporting the complete genome sequence of variants to the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention timely, and analyzing the variation trend of infection number and strain variation. 

Local governments should carry out epidemic monitoring at key places, including nursing homes, social welfare institutions, and primary and middle schools, said the document. 

Whole-genome sequencing should be carried out for positive samples of nucleic acid testing collected from inbound passengers, patients of sentinel hospitals, and key groups, and samples of severe and death cases to understand the virus strain variation trend and capture new strains timely, according to the document. 

The document also calls on cities to conduct sewage monitoring on novel coronavirus. 

Local governments should organize experts to participate in special monitoring and early warning shifts, strengthen cooperation with relevant universities and research institutes, give full play to technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence and mathematical models, enhance automatic data analysis and auxiliary research and judgment capabilities, and improve the accuracy and sensitivity of monitoring and early warning, according to the document.