WASHINGTON - The Biden administration plans to end Friday the requirement that travelers from China present a negative COVID-19 test result before entering the United States, according to a person familiar with the plan.
The plan to lift the restriction comes at a time when China's once-enormous viral surge is subsiding, and after other countries have announced their own loosening of restrictions on people traveling from China.
The administration has taken both factors into account in making the decision and will continue to monitor flights from China and other countries to help detect new variants of the virus.
The restriction was put in place two months ago, when the end of China's "zero COVID" policy led to a spike in COVID cases in the country, overwhelming hospitals, morgues and crematoriums.
US authorities then claimed that the testing requirement was necessary due to China's lack of transparency about the outbreak.
In the absence of any credible information from Beijing, scientists had to guess the size and severity of the outbreak that began in December by sifting through social media reports and other unreliable sources of information.
Public health officials were also concerned that the rapid spread of the virus within China could create opportunities for it to evolve, creating new variants that then spread to other parts of the world.
Since then, US authorities have gathered better information about the surge and the variants circulating in China.
Some experts had questioned the effectiveness of the testing requirement, as the virus was already increasing in parts of the United States at the time, fueled by an omicron subvariant that was spreading more rapidly than virus variants from China.
In the end, the United States had a relatively mild winter in terms of COVID cases.
China had denounced the United States and other countries for imposing the restrictions, accusing them of politicizing the coronavirus pandemic.
The reversal of the testing requirement comes at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and China after the Department of Energy concluded, albeit with little confidence and disagreement with some other federal agencies, that an accidental leak was most likely
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from the laboratory will cause the coronavirus pandemic.
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