Grid helps map out victory against epidemic

Beijing volunteers Zhang Jianguo (center) and his son (right) check people's temperature at the entrance of their community in Dongcheng district on Thursday. [Photo by Ju Huanzong/Xinhua]

After putting on a red uniform and a face mask at 8 am, Huang Juan gets ready to conduct a daily quarantine check on 400 households and shops in her community in Nanning, capital of South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

For the past few weeks, she has done this each and every day. The necessary routine designed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus disease, or COVID-19, was so arduous that Huang regularly topped the table on the cellphone pedometer app she uses.

Among her everyday items is a "resident roster" on which she has logged the health condition of every household. Now, she has memorized most of the information.

Guangxi has more than 80,000 grid-based community workers like Huang. Millions more safeguard a total of 650,000 urban and rural communities across China. Since the outbreak, they have done their utmost to keep the virus out of their "territories".

Grid-based management of populated communities and neighborhoods "is like dividing a big cabinet into small grids and placing objects in order, so you are no longer clueless. Whenever you need to check or sort out anything, it's easy to do", says Chen Wenjun, a senior official of Liuzhaizi village in Liaoning, a province some 3,000 kilometers northeast of Guangxi.

As for Anhui, an inland province, all the villages and residential communities of its 16 cities have adopted closed-off management since Feb 7 under a series of thorough and strict measures, where grid-based community workers had to multitask between "gatekeepers", "publicists" and "stewards", says Meng Kai, a 32-year-old grid-based worker in the city of Bengbu.

Meng says that he could not recall how many times he had climbed up and down to bring in food, take out the garbage and offer psychological advice, noting that on the busiest day, he climbed more than 100 flights of stairs.

Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic in China, has some 13,000 grids and 8,700 grid-based community workers. Each worker takes care of 300 to 500 households, according to Luo Ping, deputy secretary of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the Communist Party of China Municipal Committee of Wuhan.

Grid-based management in Wuhan has been running at full speed since Feb 11, when the city's headquarters for epidemic prevention and control required all residential areas to implement closed-off management.

"Grid staff are versatile," says Hua Qing, head of a local community affairs committee on Hanxing Street of Jianghan district, Wuhan, who also served as an ordinary grid-based community worker. "We are not only community workers, but also purchasing agents, delivery workers, barefoot doctors and psychologists."

Grid workers in Hua's community would queue at the hospital around midnight to buy drugs for their residents who were in urgent need.

"Since the community was closed off, we have completed 164 orders for those who suffer from diseases like cancer, diabetes, hypertension and heart attacks," Hua says.

Many foreigners have volunteered to join the grid-based campaign.

"The hard work Chinese grassroots workers have done is unforgettable. Their assistance reached into seemingly trivial matters, and they never complained," says Thomas Deshors, a French national who has helped deliver batches of face masks to several communities in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province.

"Grid-based workers have built the first line of defense against the virus," says Luo Ping, the Party official from the city of Wuhan.

There have been no newly confirmed coronavirus cases reported in Hua's community on Hanxing Street of Jianghan District, Wuhan, for a week.

Meng Tianyuan, an urban management worker in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, recently had a busy day working together with grid-based workers, whom he would prefer to consider as "net weavers".

Their work is like thousands of threads woven into a net, firmly protecting the residents in communities, Meng says. "They may not be as professional as medical staff at the frontline, but they are great and respectable.

"No winter lasts forever, and no spring skips its turn. I believe that with the joint effort of the whole nation, the epidemic will eventually pass," Meng says.