COMMENTARY
BEIJING - As the world enters the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, countless stories and experience have shown the strategy of "living with the virus," at least for now, means gambling at the cost of lives.
Despite the highly transmissible Omicron variant, which has triggered a new wave of cases around the globe, several countries have entirely removed or are removing their anti-pandemic restrictions.Meanwhile, a brigade of Western think tanks and media are cooking up the excuse of "immunity gap" to blame China, claiming that the approach to clearing COVID-19 infections in a timely manner has rendered the country vulnerable in its fight against Omicron, since most Chinese have no natural immunity.
This idea, which came purely out of political bias, seems very obscure and ridiculous. In fact, the science community has repeatedly cautioned that it is too soon to determine whether Omicron could begin the ending of the pandemic and whether it is time to fully reopen.
Recently, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have revealed that Omicron could resist most antibody-based therapeutics. Plus, "the Omicron variant is less pathogenic, but it's not NOT pathogenic. It can still cause severe disease, and it still kills people," warned Micheal Diamond, a medicine professor at the university.
Checking upon China's anti-virus policy and the effects, one can easily conclude that the prevention and control measures have helped China save as many lives as possible, minimize the disruption to economy and society, and contribute to the global fight against the virus and economic recovery.
COVID-19 policies should be first and foremost grounded on saving lives. And China's response to the contagion can enable the country to survive the pandemic with an extremely low number of deaths.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of Thursday, there had been more than 5.84 million deaths caused by the novel coronavirus worldwide, including more than 918,000 in the United States, while the death toll in China, the most populous country with more than 1.4 billion people, is less than 6,000.
COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population in China are 0.35, the second lowest in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resources Center.
Some countries have begun to seek an exit plan on the grounds that the global COVID-19 death rates seem to be falling due to the distribution of vaccines and less severe symptoms caused by Omicron. However, there is no definite sign that the pandemic will end in the short run.
Take the US situation as an example. In late January, US data showed daily average deaths from COVID-19 exceeded that peak during the surge driven by the previously dominant Delta.
Earlier this month, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated his concern over the narrative taking hold in some countries that "preventing transmission is no longer possible and no longer necessary" during the spread of Omicron.
"We are calling on all countries to protect their people using every tool in the toolkit, not vaccines alone," he said. "It's premature for any country either to surrender or to declare victory."
Furthermore, China's anti-virus strategy has kept its healthcare system from being overwhelmed, lessened the impact on society and empowered the Chinese economy to speedily recover.
Numerous observers have recognized the significance and positivity of China's anti-pandemic tactics to the country itself and the world economy.
In an opinion article released last week, Bloomberg said that China's policy of lockdowns, mass testing, and border quarantines has prevented a huge number of deaths at home and ensured that everything from iPhones and Teslas to fertilizer and car parts continues to flow to the rest of the world.
"If consumers and businesses want to continue to buy goods made in China without having to endure shortages and further price hikes, they should want China to stick with its 'COVID-zero' policy," it said.
When questions about the novel coronavirus' evolution remain unanswered, any hasty reopening may create a seedbed for Omicron to mutate into more dangerous variants.
As for the notion that a more infectious variant is less virulent, Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said this theory is irrational from the perspective of biology, and at least it hasn't yet been proven in the case of COVID-19.
What China has done with its prudent policy in the past two years demonstrates that some Western countries should not have undergone severe supply chain disruptions, skyrocketing inflation, social unrest, and above all, the tragic loss of lives.
Should there be some gap to bridge when tackling the pandemic, that's obviously the gap of disease prevention, instead of the so-called "immunity gap."
- Xinhua
