Those at a meeting presided over by Premier Li Keqiang on May 7 urged summing up instructive experience to improve regular measures for preventing and controlling the COVID-19 epidemic, helping schools restart classes in an orderly manner, and enhancing capacity for fast nucleic acid testing.

Premier Li also is a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, and head of the leading group on COVID-19 prevention and control.

Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and deputy head of the group, also attended the meeting.

Following the group’s framework, local governments should carefully summarize and apply practices proven effective in epidemic prevention and control, implement and refine regular containment measures, and curb imported cases in a targeted way, those at the meeting said.

It will help preserve current anti-virus achievements and avoid a fresh outbreak as business activities and service sectors get back to full capacity and schools reopen.

Related departments should waste no time in evaluating the effectiveness of prevention and control actions taken during the May Day holiday, which saw relatively massive flows of people and clusters in a certain scope, and draw useful experience to inform venues like tourist attractions, restaurants, hotels and malls on resuming services.

To make regular containment efforts more precise, the joint prevention and control mechanism of the State Council should guide local governments on releasing related guidelines and leveraging good practices. This will boost the recovery of more services involving people’s daily lives to spur consumption and push social and economic development onto the normal track across the board.

Since many junior and middle schools around the country have resumed classes and some college students have returned to campus, those at the meeting said that epidemic prevention and control in the schools must be carefully carried out.

Local governments and schools should shoulder their due responsibilities to intensify anti-epidemic training for school staff members. It is also stressed increasing support for underserved schools in improving health infrastructure and ensuring epidemic prevention supplies.

Colleges and universities should make detailed epidemic prevention and control plans and ensure enough supplies according to their specific conditions, such as returning students from different regions, densely populated dormitories, classrooms and dining halls, those at the meeting said.

According to those at the meeting, the health monitoring and reporting system for teaching and administrative staff and students should be established and constantly improved, and measures such as nucleic acid tests, detection of antibody and quarantine should be implemented as required for early detection, reporting, quarantine and treatment.

Those at the meeting called for concerted efforts to improve the nucleic acid testing ability, expand production of fast and efficient test devices, and help solve difficulties for enterprises in the process.

Meanwhile, more qualified third-party testing institutions will be included while ensuring safe, fast, and reliable tests.

Once new cases are found, the information should be released in an open and transparent way.

Leading group members Ding Xuexiang, Sun Chunlan, Huang Kunming, Cai Qi, Wang Yi, Xiao Jie and Zhao Kezhi also attended the meeting.