Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, China has loosened restrictions recently to further optimize its response, with its policies on testing, quarantine and travel adjusted.

For example, PCR tests are no longer required when entering most public venues, patients with mild COVID-19 symptoms can now undergo home quarantine, and non-high-risk areas must not impose travel restrictions or suspend businesses.

Why now?

These changes mark a significant policy shift from the dynamic zero-COVID strategy that China had been sticking to for nearly three years.

So why is China making the changes now? Because after three years' efforts, things are different in the country, according to health authorities and experts.

Firstly, the Omicron sub-variants currently prevalent in China are much milder than previous strains. They are more transmissible but cause less severe illnesses, posing much lower risk to people's health, according to health officials and experts.

China's top respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan said on Friday that 99 percent of the people infected with the latest Omicron sub-variants can fully recover within seven to 10 days, and the death rate from the variants is almost the same as that of flu.

In south China's Guangzhou City, there were more than 160,000 infected cases in the latest wave and no deaths, Tang Xiaoping, head of Guangzhou Medical University, told China Media Group on Monday. Over 90 percent of the infected people showed no symptoms or only mild illness, he added.

Secondly, more than 90 percent of people in China have been fully vaccinated, official date shows. Among them, 86.42 percent of people aged over 60, who are more vulnerable to the virus, had been fully inoculated as of November 28. The government is pushing for more senior residents to get the shot.  

Why not earlier?

Why has China waited nearly three years to make the major policy shift, given that many countries chose to live with the virus some time ago?

Actually, China has been making incremental changes to its COVID-19 policies to make them more precise and targeted over the past three years, with the overall situation evaluated. 

The latest policy shift is part of that strategy, according to the health authorities, made possible because the conditions mentioned above are only here now, after China's perseverance over the past three years.

When the virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it was much more deadly. The government made a resolute and courageous decision to shut down traffic in and out of the city. It took China three months to contain the virus in Wuhan and stop it from rippling to other parts of the country.

After that, the country reacted quickly to stamp out over 100 local outbreaks under the dynamic zero COVID principle to safeguard the lives and health of the 1.4 billion people in China.

Meanwhile, the government has been pushing a nationwide vaccination drive to build up immunity protection, which has proved to be effective in preventing deaths and severe cases.

So far, the country has kept its COVID-19 death toll at 5,235 through those relentless efforts.

Yes, the virus has been constantly mutating, from Alpha to Beta to Delta, and now Omicron, with the global death rate going down and down. But that has been a gradual process in the past three years.

Over the same period of time, worldwide, more than 6.62 million people have lost their lives to the pandemic, and the total number of infections has exceeded 642 million, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization.

In the U.S., the world's most developed country with the most abundant medical resources, over 1.09 million people have been killed by the virus and nearly 100 million people have been infected, according to its official data.

Imagine if China, a country with a population over four times that of the U.S. and less sophisticated medical infrastructure, adopted the same anti-COVID policies as the U.S. earlier. That would have put millions of lives at risk.

Lowest COVID incidence rate and deaths

As a matter of fact, China has the lowest COVID incidence rate and the lowest number of COVID deaths among major countries.

According to Zhong, as of November 28, 2022, the COVID incidence rate in China was 1/374 of the global average and 1/1348 of that in the U.S., and the death rate in China was 1/232 of the global average.

People's life expectancy rose from 77.4 in 2019 to 77.93 in 2020 and 78.2 in 2021, official data showed.

That result was achieved because the Chinese government made people's life and health its top priority when making its COVID policies.

Read more: What has China done in its nearly 3 years of COVID-19 fight?