Winton Dong

dht0620@126.com

THE State Council, China’s Cabinet, has recently unveiled a plan regarding nationwide vaccination of those considered as high-risk groups of contracting COVID-19. With the coming of winter season, chilly weather may challenge and even worsen the country’s pandemic prevention and control efforts.

According to the plan, these groups mainly include employees in medicine, health care, customs, public transportation, cross-border inspection, the cold chain industry, sea food markets, other frontline workers and those who will work, study or travel to medium or high-risk areas all over the world.

Targeting such special groups as the top priority is only the first step for China to achieve mass inoculation. The country’s step-by-step inoculation program is surely a positive development. If people in certain high-risk industries can be inoculated first, they will be better protected, so as to slow and cut the transmission channels of the virus.

Many people expressed a sense of relief and place high hope on a quick return to normal situation after the announcement of the country’s vaccination plan. Actually, the vaccine is not a coffer that offers 100 percent safety but an extra protection measure, and the whole nation cannot relax its vigilance against the pandemic. We all want our life to go back to normal as before, but this seems to be a wishful thinking for the time being. According to experts, even if effective vaccines are found, the pandemic will be with human beings in the foreseeable future, at least for the next five years. Thus, all the pandemic prevention and control measures such as wearing masks, washing hands frequently, paying attention to personal hygiene and keeping social distancing should be maintained.

Firstly, as for the function of all the available vaccines on the market, none can totally stop the spread of the virus. They can merely limit the severity of the pandemic, slow down the transmission speed, offer a buffer zone and buy some time for policymakers and medical scientists to find a final solution.

In terms of the duration of immunity provided by vaccines, based on existing evidence, domestically made vaccines can offer protection for six months. Nevertheless, more scientific research is needed to determine the duration of vaccines’ protection and it is too soon to conclude whether the vaccines can offer 10 years or even life-long protection to those inoculated.

Meanwhile, some people with allergies may not be suited for inoculation. The common side effects of the vaccines include headache, fever, coughing, vomiting, diarrhea, redness and lumps at the injection point, and lack of appetite. Generally speaking, these side effects are not serious and typically occur shortly after inoculation.

Moreover, despite the fact that China has basically tamed the pandemic for several months, the number of imported infections has recently been on the rise because of worsening situations overseas. The virus mutates very quickly and there may be different strains every year. It is obvious that mutation of the virus has made our prevention and control more complicated. With England as an example, a new strain of the pandemic is now sweeping and alarming the European nation. In order to curb its spread, many countries and regions in the world have already barred travel to and from the United Kingdom.

Compared with other Chinese cities, the prevention and control situation in Shenzhen, a city adjacent to Hong Kong, is even more serious. As we all know, Hong Kong has close trade and people-to-people connections with both the United Kingdom and Shenzhen. Although Hong Kong has banned all the flights from the U.K. since midnight Dec. 22, the special administrative region should also take pains to quarantine passengers who have arrived from Britain in the last two weeks, so as to cut possible future transmissions of the mutant virus within China.

(The author is the editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)