WASHINGTON — The Biden administration plans to end Friday the requirement for travelers from China to submit 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 as China’s huge viral wave is easing and after other countries announced their own easing of restrictions on people traveling from China.

The administration considered both factors 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 enacted 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 crematoria.

US authorities then said the testing mandate was necessary due to China’s lack of transparency about the outbreak.

In the absence of 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 in China could create opportunities for it to evolve, creating new variants that would then spread to other parts of the world.

Since then, US authorities have gathered better information on the augmentation and variants circulating in China.

Some experts questioned the effectiveness of the test requirement, as the virus was already on the rise in parts of the United States at the time, fueled by an omicron subvariant that was spreading faster than variants of the virus from China.

Ultimately, the US 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 Energy Department concluded, albeit with little confidence and disagreement with some other federal agencies, that a accidental loss from the laboratory will cause the coronavirus pandemic.

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