Epidemic Prevention and Control Measures Shouldn't result in Shortage of Supplies for Residents

In recent days, the lockdown of neighborhoods in Tonghua City of Jilin Province resulted in a part of the population encountering the problem of daily supplies not being delivered on time, which has received extensive attention. On January 24, a deputy mayor of Tonghua apologized for this issue. Early the next morning, the Tonghua municipal Party secretary headed to the front line to check the situation of daily necessities supply.

According to previous media reports, many local residents have reported "shortage of food and medicine " after Tonghua implemented by-family epidemic prevention and control measures. Some families even have "an apple that two children ate for three days"...It is difficult to imagine that in a prefectural-level city with a population of only 360,000 people, the local government cannot guarantee the supply of basic daily necessities to its people during the epidemic, to the extent that the residents had to get on the social media platform Weibo to seek national attention to solve the problem. Tonghua residents' wish to create a "trending" topic came true, and the local government started to pay attention. However, this does not mean all issues related to pandemic containment measures have been solved. After the authorities' apology, there is still a disparity between the measures taken by relevant departments in Tonghua and the reality of the population's subsistence guarantee.

Severe epidemic situation, neighborhoods lockdown, and shortage of goods and materials are nothing new. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic last year, many regions have been confronted with the shortage of supplies. However, almost one year after these circumstances first occurred, similar problems are still taking place, which demonstrates that those regions did not take the problems faced by other regions seriously, nor did they learn from others' past failures. Otherwise, pre-arranged planning should have taken place, and there shouldn't have been the issue of such shortage of supplies.

A city should have the capacity to handle emergency situations, to protect the livelihoods of citizens under these circumstances. It should be emphasized that this is not only the need when combating the current pandemic, but should be a city’s basic functional requirement. Aside from the outburst of infectious diseases, every city might be confronted with rainstorm, mountain torrents, waterlogging, electricity and water outage, and other natural disasters and accidents in their daily lives. Regardless of the size of a city, the construction of emergency response capacities and preparation of contingency plans are supposed to be routine work of local authorities.

Whether the pandemic ends or not, a good emergency response capacity should be a fundamental security guarantee for a city's development, and it should be an integral component in improving the governance ability of urban administrators. At present, the priority for various regional governments is to examine the inadequacies in their emergency response capacities, learn scientific anti-epidemic methods, and forge a comprehensive chain of epidemic prevention and control. Besides formulating an anti-pandemic contingency plan as soon as possible, local governments should also systematically and scientifically study and evaluate the anti-pandemic measures taken by other regions and see if they can be implemented locally. At appropriate times, they should conduct drills of anti-epidemic measures, to guarantee that when an epidemic takes place, there will be no mistakes in prevention and control measures.

Contributed by Chen Cheng

Translated by Zhang Junye