COVID at the Beijing Winter Olympics

China's zero-COVID strategy will be put to its biggest test to date with the Beijing Winter Olympics approach.

Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Chinese officials think they are taking the safest approach, but that may not be enough against the more transmissible omicron variant.

That's a big risk for Xi Jinping, who hasn't left the country in almost two years — but doesn't want to become isolated on the global stage.

“When other countries learn to live with the virus, and the pandemic's becoming an endemic,” Huang says. “China will find that zero-tolerance strategy unsustainable."

China, he predicts may be able to sustain zero COVID for another year, but not much longer.

Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World: Omicron & the undoing of China's COVID strategy