Shanghai: As the city of Shanghai is going through the most difficult time in its fight against Omicron, doubt, anxiety and fatigue are noticeable among local residents and some heart-wrenching stories could easily arouse the public’s mood, but more people are finding ways to cheer up, help each other and suggest solutions, as patience and persistence are more crucial to win this hard battle.
A phone call recording went viral of a desperate elderly man in Shanghai’s Xuhui district asking the community committee for help as he ran out of medicine and food. In another sad story, a public health official in the city’s Hongkou district reportedly died by suicide after he, like many other grassroots officials, had been relentlessly fighting the Omicron outbreak.
Those sad stories have follow-ups. Local authorities helped transfer the elderly man to a local hospital on Thursday for treatment and the local public health authority confirmed the death of the public health official, sending condolences to his family and vowing to take care of his wife who has cancer.
It’s indeed the most difficult time for Shanghai as intensive public anger flooded the internet. The Global Times talked with a dozen residents in Shanghai from at least five districts on Thursday, and learned that they faced various difficulties in the past weeks such as food shortage, delayed transfer of their infected neighbors to collective quarantine places, and the chaotic handling of residents’ daily requests in some neighborhoods.
However, unlike claims made by some Western media that dynamic zero-COVID strategy is facing resistance in Shanghai, those residents do not have doubts about this approach, which has been proven successful over the past two years in containing the virus and keeping the death rate caused by COVID-19 at a low level.
Experts said the current difficulties of Shanghai exposed that the city’s lack of preparation for the Omicron outbreak, policy flip-flops, loopholes in community management and a “lower-guard” mentality among officials due to fatigue in fighting the epidemic. To ease public’s mood, it’s necessary to be transparent on controversial social issues and the epidemic handling, fix the problems such as the delayed treatment of elderly people who have underlying diseases, and mobilize all officials and Party members to help streamline the supply of daily necessities, and ease the mounting pressure on grassroots workers and volunteers.
Problems exposed by Shanghai are also the problems needed to be tackled by other parts of China when the country has to stick to its dynamic zero-COVID strategy amid Omicron, but the strategy needs to be more specific and scientific.
Shanghai’s previous targeted prevention approach appears to have fallen behind in the race against the highly contagious and more concealed Omicron variant, even though it helped the financial engine weather previous flare-ups without compromising economic growth, some experts said, noting that the lessons that Shanghai offers to the rest of the country is how important it is to stick to the dynamic zero-COVID policy.
The current global epidemic is still very serious, as prevention and control work cannot be relaxed. Persistence is victory, Chinese President Xi Jinping said during an ongoing inspection tour to South China’s Hainan. He also emphasized that it is necessary to adhere to the people and life first, adhere to scientific precision, dynamic approach and pay close attention to various measures for epidemic prevention and control. -The Daily Mail-Global Times News Exchange Item
