Officials have been playing down the dangers the virus poses, bringing China in closer alignment with what other countries have been saying for more than a year as they opted to live with the virus and drop restrictions.
The director of the Beijing Institute of Respiratory Diseases, Tong Zhaohui, said the latest Omicron variant had caused fewer cases of severe disease than the 2009 global influenza outbreak, according to Chinese state television.
Reuters reported that China's management of the virus could be downgraded as soon as January to the less strict category B, from the current top-level Category A of infectious disease.People line up at a nucleic acid testing site to get tested for COVID-19 in Beijing"The most difficult period has passed," the official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary, citing the weakening pathogenicity of the virus and efforts to vaccinate 90% of the population.
"The general direction for the return to normal life is already very clear, and it is essential to restore the free movement of people across provinces to restore the economy," the former editor-in-chief of the state-run tabloid Global Times wrote in a blog post.
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