BEI­JING (AP) — Chi­na says more than 200 mil­lion of its cit­i­zens have been di­ag­nosed and treat­ed for COVID-19 since it lift­ed strict con­tain­ment mea­sures be­gin­ning in No­vem­ber.

With 800,000 of the most crit­i­cal­ly ill pa­tients hav­ing re­cov­ered, Chi­na has “de­ci­sive­ly beat­en” the pan­dem­ic, ac­cord­ing to notes from a meet­ing of the rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s all-pow­er­ful Polit­buro Stand­ing Com­mit­tee presided over by Pres­i­dent and par­ty leader Xi Jin­ping.

Chi­na en­forced some of the world’s most dra­con­ian lock­downs, quar­an­tines and trav­el re­stric­tions and still faces ques­tions about the ori­gins of the virus that was first de­tect­ed in the cen­tral Chi­nese city of Wuhan in late 2019. Heavy-hand­ed en­force­ment prompt­ed rare an­ti-gov­ern­ment protests and took a heavy toll on the world’s sec­ond-largest econ­o­my.
The of­fi­cial Xin­hua News Agency quot­ed Xi as say­ing that poli­cies to con­trol the out­break had been “en­tire­ly cor­rect.” The abrupt lift­ing in No­vem­ber and De­cem­ber of the “ze­ro COVID” pol­i­cy that had sought to elim­i­nate all cas­es of the virus led to a surge in in­fec­tions that tem­porar­i­ly over­whelmed hos­pi­tals.

Case num­bers have since peaked and life has large­ly re­turned to nor­mal, al­though in­ter­na­tion­al trav­el in and out of Chi­na has yet to re­turn to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els.

Chi­na is now tran­si­tion­ing to a post-pan­dem­ic stage af­ter a fight against the out­break that was “ex­tra­or­di­nary in the ex­treme,” Xin­hua said.
The gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue to “op­ti­mize and ad­just pre­ven­tion and con­trol poli­cies and mea­sures ac­cord­ing to the times and sit­u­a­tions with a strong his­tor­i­cal re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and strong strate­gic de­ter­mi­na­tion,” Xin­hua said.