BEIJING, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- In his recent Bloomberg piece, Sam Fazeli, a senior pharmaceutical analyst, said about COVID-19 control in China, "there is no way an uncontrolled wave of infections can be managed."

 

Let's quantify Fazeli's claims with data. In May, a Nature Medicine study showed that China could see an Omicron wave resulting in approximately 1.55 million deaths and a projected ICU peak demand of up to 15.6 times the existing capacity, should its current dynamic zero-COVID strategy be lifted.

 

That's part of the reason why China, in keeping with the fluid situation, has been choosing to fine-tune the measures for epidemic response in the face of the recent resurgence of cases rather than change its dynamic zero-COVID policy.

 

That message was reaffirmed after the country's Vice Premier Sun Chunlan on Wednesday urged efforts to further optimize the COVID-19 response.

 

That's neither a "full reopening," nor "lying flat."

 

China's COVID death toll has stayed low ever since the start of the pandemic. As BBC has pointed out, China's reported figure "equates to three COVID deaths in every million in China, compared with 3,000 per million in the U.S. and 2,400 per million in the UK."

 

The COVID response system and measures should not stay unchanged, given that the novel coronavirus has changed and is still mutating.

 

China's optimized epidemic response measures emphasize precision to combat new, highly contagious mutant COVID-19 strains. The goal is still to save people's lives and health while reducing the epidemic's negative effects on daily life in both the public and private spheres.

 

China's local authorities are introducing detailed measures to better implement the central government's policies, such as more precisely managing temporary closed-off situations with a maximum duration of 24 hours in general and forbidding the installation of solid barriers in front of fire passages and other important exits from residential complexes.

 

The significance of the world's most populous country's anti-epidemic efforts is evident.

 

Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz recently wrote in her retort to her own paper's reporting on China's handling of the COVID-19 resurgence, "choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the U.S. is doing) isn't a 'critical flaw.'"