Late-night disco partying. Elbow-to-elbow seating in movie theatres. Mask-free bearing of faces in public, especially in Europe and North America: Bit by bit, many countries that have been hard-hit by the coronavirus are opening up and easing their tough, and often unpopular, restrictive measures aimed to fight COVID-19 even as the Omicron variant — deemed less severe — has caused cases to skyrocket.The early moves to relax such restrictions evoke a new turning point in a nearly two-year pandemic that has been full of them.Omicron, the Geneva-based World Health Organisation says, has fuelled more cases — 90 million — in the world over the last 10 weeks than during all of 2020, the outbreak's first full year.
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