General secretary sees unremitting work on contagion, reopening, beating poverty

China will continue with unremitting epidemic containment measures, adopt concrete measures to reopen businesses and schools and ensure that its poverty alleviation goals will be met this year, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said on Friday.

Xi made the remark as he presided over a symposium in Beijing convened by the CPC Central Committee to solicit opinions from non-CPC members on COVID-19 prevention and control.

China, after arduous efforts, has attained major strategic outcomes in the battle against the outbreak, he said. It has also achieved positive outcomes in coordinating epidemic containment and socioeconomic development.

The country must ensure that goals set for winning the war against poverty and building a moderately prosperous society in all respects are met, he said.

Xi urged more targeted and effective measures to prevent the importation of infections, enforce and refine normalized containment measures and bolster self-protection awareness among the people to prevent a possible domestic rebound of the outbreak.

The country managed to preliminarily stem the momentum of the virus' spread during a period of over a month, control the number of daily new infections to single digits in around two months and secure decisive outcomes in safeguarding Hubei province and its capital Wuhan from the virus after three months, he said.

It was a hard-won result for a major country with 1.4 billion people, he said. The nation has remained committed to a people-centered approach and mobilized its best doctors, equipment and most desperately needed resources in all-out efforts to treat infected patients, with all medical costs covered by the government, he said. In doing so, China has maximized testing efficiency, improved recovery rates and made the utmost efforts to reduce infection and mortality rates.

The whole nation, in various ways, has joined the battle against the pandemic and forged an indestructible force. The country has showcased its strength, spirit and efficiency with its mobilization of resources from the whole of society and various sectors, he added.

China has also offered help within its capacity to other countries and international organizations, which showed it to be a responsible major country, he said.

Xi also said the pandemic has also exposed some weak links in the mechanisms to cope with major outbreaks and in the public health system. It is important to reform and refine the disease control and prevention system, establish an epidemic containment and medical treatment system for emergencies and non-emergencies and accelerate the building of a new system pooling national resources for the research and development of core technologies, he added.