China's National Health Commission (NHC) on Saturday urged local governments not to recklessly impose additional COVID-19 measures targeting people returning home from other regions during the Spring Festival holiday. The additional measures have caused complaints by returnees.

Mi Feng, spokesman for the NHC, said at a news briefing that some people have complained about having difficulties in traveling back to their hometown for the seven-day holiday, because of the extra COVID-19 curbs imposed by local authorities.

Those requirements include restricting people from low-risk areas from returning, requiring returnees to undergo centralized isolation at their own expense, and extending a centralized isolation period and the length of health monitoring at home. 

Mi said the State Council's joint prevention and control mechanism has examined these issues and ordered some local governments to rectify.

He stressed that, during the upcoming holiday, local governments must refrain from recklessly banning people from returning, expanding movement restrictions or applying policies targeting medium- or high-risk areas to low-risk areas.

In addition, local authorities should not require people returning from low-risk areas to go back or go through centralized quarantine, nor should they extend length of isolation periods at will.

Thanks to China's swift response, the country has brought several domestic outbreaks driven by the Delta or Omicron variants under control, said He Qinghua, an official with NHC's Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control, at the press briefing.

The Delta outbreak concentrated in Beijing's Fengtai District has been effectively contained, but local virus control work is still at a crucial stage, He said.

To ensure the domestic epidemic situation remains stable throughout the holiday, He said the commission will pay more attention to guiding COVID-19 outbreak areas deal with the virus, devote to inspecting potential risks in key venues and manage the epidemic prevention and control work nationwide and guarantee a reunion for returnees.

As of Friday, China had fully vaccinated nearly 1.23 billion people, including over 210 million people older than 60, according to the NHC.

On Saturday, the Chinese mainland reported 54 domestic COVID-19 cases, according to the NHC.