More than 30 Chinese officials have been fired or received other punishments over accusations they failed to respond properly to the latest surge of the coronavirus in the country.
Among those fired were a vice mayor, heads of city districts and health commissions, and staff in hospital management, airport and tourism departments.
China’s National Health Commission yesterday announced 94 new cases of domestic transmission had been recorded over the previous 24 hours, according to the Associated Press.
The latest outbreak is linked to the airport in the eastern city of Nanjing. The highly contagious delta variant spread among airport workers and has since spread from tropical Hainan province in the south to Inner Mongolia in the far north.
The outbreak has prompted renewed travel restrictions, community lockdowns and the sealing off of the entire city of Zhangjiajie, with a population of 1.5 million.
Gao Qiang, China’s former health minister, stressed the importance of plugging loopholes in warding off imported infections in an article published last week, saying that the country is capable of eliminating the virus in the same way China swiftly contained the outbreak in 2020, the Global Times has reported. Experts said the “timely punishment for the incompetent officials in the epidemic control work is an appropriate action” as the anti-epidemic battle bears no loopholes, mistakes or neglect by those in charge of the work, the state-controlled tabloid added.
According to the same source, in Nanjing where the latest outbreak started, at least 15 officials received penalties on Saturday, including Hu Wanjin, a vice mayor of Nanjing, Fang Zhongyou, Party chief of the Nanjing Health Commission and Wang Chao, commander of the anti-epidemic control work at Nanjing Lukou International Airport.
The ineffective epidemic prevention and control at the airport was found to have triggered the outbreak, the report reads.
In the Hunan Province tourist city of Zhangjiajie, which was a key spot of COVID-19 infections in the latest outbreak, 20 officials and public post holders “were punished for their slack response in dealing with the flare-up.”
According to the Global Times, the long list of punishments includes district officials, hospital management staff , staff with the tourism sector and related personnel to a local performance show for tourists. The performance caused a massive spread of the virus to at least eight provinces and regions across China.
The other two epidemic-stricken cities, Zhengzhou in Henan Province, and Yantai in Shandong Province, also announced disciplinary actions against officials and personnel who “performed ineffectively in their management and supervisory responsibilities” for epidemic prevention and control.
Fu Guirong, secretary of Zhengzhou Health Commission Party group, was removed from her post. The Party chief of Zhengzhou Sixth People’s Hospital, a designated hospital for treatment of overseas arrivals who are infected with COVID-19, was also sacked.
Zhengzhou Health Commission was urged to make adjustments to the management of the hospital after many of the confirmed and asymptomatic COVID-19 patients in the city were found to be related to the hospital, including cleaning staff, medical staff, inpatients and their escorts.
The district head of Laishan district in Yantai, among others, was dismissed for failing to fulfill epidemic prevention and control. Yantai launched its second round of citywide nucleic acid testing on Saturday.
Wang Peiyu, a deputy head of Peking University’s School of Public Health, told the Global Times that the outbreak that started in Nanjing and spread rapidly to several provinces has shown the loopholes in the epidemic control work in some places, such as airports, and exposed the mistakes and lapses of some individuals who hold important posts in the overall anti-epidemic work.
“The outbreak is a wake-up call to all of us – the virus may slide in any time when we loosen controls. We must always tighten the string of epidemic prevention,” he said.
Officials in the UK and Singapore have explicitly encouraged people to adapt to the virus and live with it.
Zhang Wenhong, a leading infectious disease expert in Shanghai, also said the majority of virologists in the world agree that the world has to learn to live with this virus.
Gao Qiang refuted the idea, saying that it was such pursuit of the so-called “coexistence with the virus” that has led to the resurgence of the epidemic in many countries.
China’s anti-epidemic strategy is a “double insurance” strategy of precise epidemic control and widespread vaccination, rather than replacing strict epidemic control with herd immunity, let alone “coexistence with the virus,” he said in the article.
The painful lesson of the Nanjing epidemic told us that in the face of widespread vaccination, the central government’s policy of normalizing epidemic control remains an important guideline to be followed in China’s fight against the epidemic, he said, as quoted by the Global Times. MDT/Agencies
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