‘One city, one policy’: China is keeping it local to fight the COVID-19 wave

Shanghai – China is using local tactics to fight a wave of COVID-19 outbreaks, an approach that avoids the kind of widespread shutdown that devastated the economy last year but is also hurting definitely ahead of the Lunar New Year’s travel season.

In the Hebei area, which surrounds Beijing and has witnessed hundreds of diseases in the past two weeks, officials at Monday’s meeting were told to adhere to the principle of “one city, one policy” and draw up individual plans for each community.

After testing for new COVID-19 infections in just a few days a month, China has seen a spike in cases since the beginning of the year, with more than 100 a day recently, raising fears of a revolution. out big.

Speaking to new organizations in Hebei and elsewhere, the National Health Commission (NHC) said last week that local officials must be on guard and “one-size-fits-all solutions. ”To avoid.

Beijing, for example, has left it to regional authorities and employers to urge or encourage people not to travel during the upcoming holiday, which begins Feb. 1. 12 and is usually the busiest travel time of the year.

More than 20 districts at regional level have asked people to stay on holiday but stopped short of bans, to the detriment of potential travelers.

“I wanted to book my ticket for Jan. 25, but I got a call from my hometown community that they didn’t know what would happen several days later and couldn’t get a 100% guarantee that I could go back without needing to quarantine, ”said Weibo social media platform user Yijin Jiajin.

Rules and guidelines change and often shift, even within cities, creating uncertainty.

Although they have been urged not to work too hard, local governments in the worst-hit areas are introducing worrying measures to close COVID-19 transmission pathways.

“The special officers are left to the local officials to put out meat, which means that if anything goes wrong, they will affect the people and the anger of the central government,” Yifei Li said. , a professor at Shanghai New York University studying environmental and public health policies in China.

On Tuesday, Qiqihar in northeastern Heilongjiang district became the newest city to order some residents to stay indoors.

In Beijing, some residential compounds were also sealed.

Approximately 30 million people in the north and northeast are now under various forms of curfew, although cities seem to avoid the word “lock down,” or “fengcheng”In Chinese, which was widely used to describe measures to respond to last year’s uprising in Wuhan and its environs, where the virus appeared in late 2019.

Without centralized guidelines, cities and local government bureaus have published dozens of rules in the past few days about controlling the uprising over the holidays.

While there have been no recent local issues in Shanghai, many residential buildings have put pressure on messengers and rebuilt the control stations that were in place outside of all early manure. last year.

Hebei has taken the toughest measures, including banning weddings and funerals, but has also ordered local officials to stop the types of raw city barriers that have been seen today. last year. Any attempt to close national roads, build barricades or dig trenches would be punished, the provincial government said Tuesday.

“I’m not sure if we can blame local officials for being too cautious. The real problem seems to be that they are unbelievable, ”said Li.