Anti-pandemic work must put people first

The latest flare-up of novel coronavirus infections on the Chinese mainland, driven by the more transmissible Omicron variant, shows no signs of easing, with 1,947 locally transmitted cases reported by the National Health Commission on Monday. Which means people will continue to be subjected to strict prevention and control measures, including mass nucleic acid testing and targeted lockdowns.

Yet in implementing these anti-pandemic measures, some local public health officials, for fear of being held responsible for any severe resurgence of the virus, have tended to discard the scientific anti-pandemic protocol drawn up by the central authorities and instead doubled down on the already quite tight restrictive measures. In the face of the public health crisis, they have given higher priorities to their own interests than those of the people.

They are doing so despite so much having been learned about the disease as well as the way to handle it as the country enters the third year of its fight against the virus. Actually, only two deaths associated with the virus have been reported over the past more than one year, and both fatalities occurred in elderly patients with underlying diseases.

Thus the abuse of prevention and control measures by some in the name of ensuring the common good is just lazy governance. Such a practice has led to tragedies in some places. A 4-year-old girl died of acute laryngitis recently in Changchun, Jilin province, while waiting for her nucleic acid test result. This happened even after the central government called for timely treatment of all patients requiring urgent care following a similar incident in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, where a pregnant woman was refused admission to hospital in January because her nucleic acid test result had expired, leading to her having a miscarriage.

Such thoughtless application of the pandemic prevention and control measures do a disservice to the national anti-pandemic efforts.

By going to the extreme in epidemic control work, some officials have obviously turned a deaf ear to the central leadership’s call to achieve the best results in epidemic control with “minimum costs” to economic activities and people’s livelihoods and well-being.

As the country continues its fight against the virus, local officials must bear in mind that all anti-pandemic work must be people-oriented. They must stick to the science-based differentiated and targeted prevention and control approach when trying to contain local resurgences rather than imposing indiscriminate lockdowns and other restrictions on people.

Failure to do so risks undoing all the good that has been achieved so far in the anti-pandemic work.

Editorial, China Daily