2022年02月10日 星期四
Comment
Stop Pointing Fingers at China's ZTP
By Staff Reporters

  

  Over the past few months, China has been actively containing COVID-19 based on the country's zero-tolerance policy (ZTP). With the great effort made by the government and the public, the pandemic situation in China is well under control. However, some Western politicians and experts, especially in the U.S., have consistently questioned and criticized the ZTP policy.

  On January 25, Ezekiel Emanuel and Michael Osterholm, the former members of a scientific COVID-19 advisory team to Biden Administration, posted an article in The New York Times, saying ZTP was unsustainable and even threatening the U.S. and the global supply chain. They suggest China can learn from some European countries to build immunity by spreading the virus.

  And here is what is happening in the world today: on February 6, the number of confirmed cases in the Chinese mainland was only 79(in 31 provinces), with no severe cases increase. The U.S. had over 290,000 thousand new confirmed cases and 2,565 deaths on the same day.

  The data gap between the two countries is stark, and it is hard for people to understand why these U.S. experts keep saying China's policy is unsustainable though China has shown repeated victories over the virus for two years. What makes it even more incomprehensible is their views on letting the Chinese get infected in exchange for U.S. supply-chain security. Considering the Biden administration once hired these experts as consultants, how could the U.S. anti-pandemic work be effective!

  Emanuel seemed to enjoy his viewpoint and shared the article on Twitter with a comment, "You can't build a wall around COVID; it's why China's zero-COVID policy is unsustainable. We all need China to come to terms with our new normal of endemic COVID. If not, disease & shutdowns there will affect the whole world."

  Without a doubt, this article has received little praise, except for the perennial anti-Chinese brigade. Almost all the Twitter comments were critical of Emanuel.

  Israeli Bioinformatics specialist Yaniv Erlich said, "This article is really cute. M.D.s from a nation that lost two years of life expectancy, couldn't issue enough tests, deployed the army to help hospitals, had riots and great resignation, give advice to a nation that hasn't experienced any of this."

  Scott MacEachern, an archaeologist, replied sarcastically to the Twitter comment, "Sure. After all, a policy that has prevented many hundreds of thousands of needless COVID deaths is inconsistent with Western values. Can't have that!... Many of the Western articles about China and COVID over the last two years have been predicated on the assumption that Chinese lives are not as important as Western ones."

  The dynamic ZTP approach is the general policy of China's current pandemic prevention and control, and it is the embodiment of the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life. The practice of the past two years has shown that ZTP fully guarantees the health and safety of the Chinese people and ensures the normal operation of society and the smooth development of the national economy to the greatest extent possible. Many Western scholars can see this clearly, and many Americans who have suffered from COVID-19 are gradually seeing it. Newsweek published an article pointing out that once China decides to cancel the ZTP and chooses the U.S. method to deal with the pandemic, the number of newly diagnosed cases in China would exceed 630,000 in a single day, and China's medical system could collapse.

  In addition, some foreign media also criticized China's nucleic acid testing for being too strict. Rather than saying that China's testing standards are too high, it is more proper to say that some countries' testing standards are too low. In line with a responsible attitude towards people's life, health and safety, China has every reason to be more vigilant against Omicron, a variant with amazing transmission ability.

  As for the comment of China affecting the global commodity supply chain, this is ludicrous. They should stop accusing China immediately, especially when most of the quarantine materials around them are all "Made in China."

  The successive emergence of various COVID strains such as Delta and Omicron shows that the pursuit of the so-called "natural immunity" policy promotes the virus's continuous mutation and makes the global pandemic situation more difficult to recover. Some experts recommend their own countries give up fighting against the virus and want other countries to follow suit. We wonder if this is because they have taken a professional wrong turn, or are they continuing to make excuses for their poor performance in preventing the outbreak?

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