Recently, “mound road closures” have reappeared in many rural areas. A villager in Pingdingshan, Henan, told the Beijing News that the road in the village was “closed” without receiving a notice of road closure, nor was there any case report in the village. They told reporters that road closures have caused cyclists to fall and be injured, and cars to detour and run over large areas of crops. The reporter noticed that on social media, many netizens said that their villages and roads were closed. Those with addresses involved Liaoning, Hubei, Jiangxi, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and other places.
The reason why some places make such decisions on their own may be related to the relatively severe situation of epidemic prevention and control. At the beginning of the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, traffic restrictions such as road closures and road interruptions appeared concentratedly. At that time, the whole society did not understand the virus enough, and the measures to prevent and control the epidemic were also being summed up. Practices such as “piling up roads” are still criticized for being simple and rude.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, our experience, methods and confidence in fighting the virus have been steadily increasing. It is said that the prevention and control should be more orderly, scientific and precise. However, some epidemic prevention chaos in various places still reminds us: in the process of implementing epidemic prevention policies, individual places may still be unable to restrain the impulse to overweight and over-epidemic, and do not play their cards according to the rules. Regarding the “one size fits all” approach that ignores the relevant regulations and the actual situation, the relevant departments have repeated orders to stop it. Local governments in similar situations need to reflect on why these chaotic phenomena have returned to their old ways. Why do some people selectively ignore things that they know they can’t and can’t do?
The significance of the existence of roads is to allow people and goods to pass through, and to bring convenience to social production and life. Compared with cities, the distribution of people in rural areas is not so dense, and the transportation network is not so complicated, but the few roads are also the infrastructure for people to maintain production and life, and communicate with the outside world. Once the roads are physically isolated, it means that the village The passage to the outside world is closed, and the life of the villagers is bound to be affected. More importantly, the villagers can postpone some things, but there are also some things, such as farming activities related to the season, timely picking and delivery of fresh agricultural products, etc., they cannot and cannot wait.
On November 23, “Farmer’s Daily” published an article, which mentioned in the analysis of “Why Farmers Destroy Vegetables” that “traffic obstruction” in the epidemic has become an important factor that cannot be ignored in the unsalable vegetables , emphasizing not to let “overweight” hurt farmers. From a larger perspective, even if a village is not an export base of special agricultural products, the roads connect thousands of households, and roads are blocked at will. If a villager has a sudden illness, how can he go out to seek medical treatment? If the local epidemic situation is not serious, all localities can implement the epidemic prevention requirements according to the actual situation. If the threat of the epidemic is indeed serious, the village-level units should also act in accordance with the law and regulations according to the deployment of their superiors. Just in case, increasing the price without authorization, or even “closing the road with mounds of dirt”, will only increase panic and add obstacles to people’s normal life. The cost of doing so is too high, and it is by no means a wise choice.
Since the publication of twenty measures to optimize epidemic prevention and control, the concept of scientific, orderly, and precise epidemic prevention has been further refined. But the vitality of policy lies in its implementation, otherwise it will be difficult to provide stable expectations for people’s lives. Some epidemic prevention chaos has been criticized not only because they do not meet the requirements of relevant laws, regulations and epidemic prevention policies, but also because these practices violate social rules. When the rules can be distorted at will, the people will be at a loss. Accurate and effective implementation of the latest epidemic prevention policies is the embodiment of people-oriented and life-oriented.
(Author: Bai Yipeng, source: China Youth Review)