The US will calm down COVID-19 testing requirements for travelers coming from China as soon as Friday, based on a report.
US officials told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the choice to lift negative COVID-test requirements was made due to declining cases of the virus in China.
The officials said the shift was driven by public health priorities and never foreign policy concerns, based on the outlet.
The brand new rule was reportedly being finalized Tuesday, but national security and health officials will notify US airlines, Chinese diplomats and others before publicly announcing the change.
In January, the US and several other other countries implemented negative test requirements for air travelers from China older than 2 amid a surge of coronavirus cases within the communist nation after Beijing abandoned its stringent zero-COVID policies.
The US also hoped the testing rule would pressure the Chinese government to be more transparent with its COVID-19 data after releasing implausible numbers of cases and deaths — criticized by health authorities as too low — within the run-up to ending its lockdown restrictions.
US officials acknowledge that China remains to be likely undercounting deaths and cases, but imagine the info points to a decline in infections, as many of the Chinese population was likely infected throughout the recent wave.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will still proceed its voluntary genomic sequencing program at airports for travelers from China, based on Reuters.
The Genomic Surveillance Program assists health authorities detect early recent variants and was expanded in December.
Tensions between China and the US have been elevated since last month’s spy balloon incident — which saw surveillance craft reportedly launched from China’s Hainan Island hover over sensitive US nuclear weapons sites and cross the US mainland before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.
US officials say China has rebuffed calls from Washington because the shoot-down.
In a rare rebuke of US policy, Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Monday accused the US of leading “containment, encirclement and suppression” efforts against the communist power.
“Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” Xi said in a speech to China’s top political advisory body.
Feathers have also been ruffled in Beijing over reports that top US agencies, including the Department of Energy and the FBI, have concluded that COVID-19 originated from a lab within the Chinese city of Wuhan researching bat coronaviruses.
Chinese officials have denied the so-called “lab leak theory,” blasting it as defamatory.