China hasn’t budged in its opposition to living with COVID-19 even amid the country’s worst outbreak, but its leaders are now pursuing an easier containment strategy in the uphill battle to tame the hyperinfectious coronavirus.
Omicron’s extensive spread means returning to zero local cases is a tall order, even in cities that repeatedly test all residents, trace close contacts and confine everyone to their homes while the virus rages. Instead, officials have now decided that infections among close contacts already corralled into isolation facilities don’t pose a high risk.
The new metric to watch is the number of cases found among people who aren’t yet in quarantine. It’s when that metric — known as "zero infection in society” in Chinese — falls to zero that China considers an outbreak contained.