Author | Liang Jianzhang

Title | IC photo

At a press conference held on March 15, a spokesperson for the National Health Commission said that there had been no new reports of local confirmed cases in Hubei and cities other than Wuhan. They have been in single digits since February 27, and have reported zero for 3 consecutive days. There is no doubt that the number of “locally diagnosed cases” continues to decline, which means that the domestic epidemic prevention and control has achieved obvious results. As for the official emphasis on this term, it naturally contains another meaning, that is, the focus in the future will be on preventing “ foreign input “.

Because of this background, Beijing recently announced an important measure— —from 00:00 on March 16th, all foreigners entering Beijing should be transferred to a centralized observation point for 14 days. Isolation observation, isolation personnel costs need to take care of themselves . It should be said that this is a very strict restriction. First of all, the scope of limitation is “all overseas personnel entering Beijing”, that is, regardless of the country of origin and country of origin, as long as they enter Beijing from outside the country, the rule will apply; second, the measures taken for these personnel are “centralized isolation”, and Instead, let them return to their residence or hotel in Beijing for “home isolation.” To understand it simply, as long as you travel to Beijing from abroad, you can’t go anywhere after entering China. You must first stay in a strange place for two weeks.

The original intention of the government to introduce this policy is clearly to minimize the risk of infection in the Beijing area. After all, as the epidemic continues to spread abroad, many European and American countries are beginning to face huge crises. To be sure, the cumulative number of diagnoses and deaths overseas will soon exceed China. In this context, China has become the safest region in the world’s major economies. Just as the epidemic had just started in China, some people chose to go abroad to avoid the threat of the epidemic.

So with the reversal of risk coefficients in various countries, many people may come to China from high-risk countries. And from the recent examples of some cases, due to the concealment and false reporting of some of them, it poses a considerable security threat to their area. Therefore, in this case, the government has adjusted its immigration policy for security reasons, and it is still in the right direction. But the question is, Do you have to take almost extreme restrictions, even for security?

Compared with Beijing, Shanghai also introduced measures to prevent overseas import risks in the previous stage. The rules of Shanghai are that all Chinese and foreign personnel have had key countries or regions within 14 days before entering Shanghai. For those who live in the country, they will be isolated for 14 days. The scope of this “key country or region” can be adjusted continuously according to the latest international situation. At the beginning, South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan were included in the list. A few days ago, France, Spain, Germany, and the United States were added to the list. As for the measures of “isolation”, asymptomatic immigrants are allowed to adopt the method of self-isolation at the place of residence.

Surely someone will worry, if these people are just asked to be isolated at home, what if they run around with the latent virus? In fact, Shanghai has long considered this issue. Allowing self-isolation does not mean laissez-faire at the government level. In fact, when these people enter the country, they will go through a series of strict and standardized procedures.

First, the customs checks the health declaration card of the personnel, then performs infrared temperature measurement, repeatedly confirms the relevant information, and divides according to the final destination. After the diversion, immigrants are not allowed to leave the airport by taking a ride-hailing car or taxi. Instead, they can be sent to the centralized isolation point and home isolation point by the staff stationed in the airport in 16 districts of Shanghai and neighboring provinces. Before departure, the relevant information has been pushed to the relevant town where the residence is located, and a three-person team of the residence: Resident cadres, community police and community doctors take over. When the immigrants return to the community, they need to take their temperature again, and they will be informed of the related issues during the quarantine and sign a home isolation commitment.

Through the introduction above, it is not difficult for everyone to find that compared with Beijing’s current one-size-fits-all severe measures, Shanghai’s measures are much more precise and more humane. Of course, the Shanghai model may seem more complicated and laborious, but in fact, as long as grassroots governance capabilities are in place, this set of measures is still sufficient to ensure the safety of a city. For several first-tier cities in China, they can have the ability to be confident and show this ability in the attention of the world.

As for the purpose of demonstrating capabilities, it is not just to prove your own strength, but also to maintain an attitude of opening up to the outside world, and to strive to promote the necessary international exchanges. We have repeatedly emphasized that China must be alert to the risks of decoupling from the world. Just a month ago, this risk was more manifested in the possibility that other countries might adopt isolation measures against China.

And today, a month later, the risk has become a radical measure that China may adopt to isolate and restrict externally in pursuit of zero risk. Once the power of the measure is infinitely amplifiedThat may cause China to actually close its door and cut off commodity exchanges, information exchanges, capital exchanges and personnel exchanges with other countries and regions. As the world’s largest trading nation, China cannot afford the risk of economic collapse caused by self-closure. This risk may affect more households than the risk of an outbreak.

So, despite the fact that the epidemic is currently in danger of growing worldwide. However, we we still need to judge the risk levels in different regions and take targeted measures based on the assessment. For example, Shanghai has expanded the list of key countries from four to eight countries, and may add more members in the future. At the same time, for people from countries with lower risk of epidemic, there is no need to adopt centralized quarantine for all immigrants. There is no need for quarantine for people from countries and regions with very low risks, such as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. This can reduce the obstacles to foreign exchanges, and can also strengthen the relatively limited resources in the hands of the government to isolate people from other high-risk areas.

So, what criteria should be adopted to determine the level of risk in a country or region? We provide a thought here as a reference, that is, you can compare the number of newly diagnosed patients in a country or region in the past period, and combined with its total population, you can make a preliminary assessment of the epidemic prevention and control performance of that country or region.

The picture above is a form we made on March 15 based on the latest data. It can be found from the form that if the “average number of newly diagnosed patients ( Per million people) “as the standard, Italy and Iran are the countries with the most severe epidemics at present, while European countries such as Belgium and Austria are relatively easy to be ignored in the past because their absolute values ​​are not high. But if you look at the population, you will find that their situation is also very serious. At the other end of the table, China is clearly one of the best countries for epidemic prevention and control.

South Korea and Japan, which have raised concerns, have gradually improved recently, and their risk factors areMuch lower than European countries. In addition, most of the recent newly diagnosed data in China, Singapore and other countries come from overseas inputs. In terms of local prevention and control effects alone, these countries have done very well. I believe that with the government, more detailed data can be obtained, and there will be more accurate algorithms. Therefore, the government can dynamically adjust the corresponding immigration policy based on the calculation of the risk coefficients of various countries and regions. For example, in the future, if the values ​​of South Korea and Japan steadily fall below a certain threshold, there is no need to maintain high-level preventive measures.

In short, on the issue of strengthening inbound quarantine, as with domestic quarantine policies, the pursuit of zero risk at all costs is not a scientific goal, and the blind pursuit of zero input cases is not a scientific goal . The cases imported in the future are likely to be significantly higher than domestic cases of infection, which is a manifestation of the advantages of our national epidemic prevention capabilities. We need to find infected people who enter the country as soon as possible to prevent local infections, and we must remain open to low-risk areas. Therefore, it is a more rational and scientific choice to scientifically formulate hierarchical management measures based on regional characteristics and government capabilities.