Nation's virus fight benefits global health

The world needs to applaud China's dynamic zero-COVID measures. As the saying goes, "Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches".

China, having been one of the first countries to experience the devastating effects of COVID-19, has stayed focused on the war against the pandemic. The country has optimized its COVID-19 response measures to cope with the new epidemic control situation amid the evolution of the novel coronavirus.

Looking back, the pandemic has had a large impact on global socioeconomic systems, presenting unprecedented challenges to public health, education, food security and global supply chain systems. Economies were destroyed. Businesses were forced to shut down. Tens of millions of people were on the verge of experiencing extreme poverty, while millions of lives were lost and thousands of children left orphans.

At some point in 2020, the world almost came to a standstill when countries were implementing COVID-19 preventive measures. However, guided by the key pillars of transforming the global community from the ravaging impacts of the pandemic, President Xi Jinping underscored the need for countries to strengthen international cooperation against COVID-19, carry out active cooperation on research and development of vaccines, jointly build multiple lines of defense against the pandemic and speed up efforts to build a healthy global community.

Resilient and determined to win the war against the pandemic, China became the first major country in 2020 to post positive economic growth. Similarly, in 2021, China's GDP expanded by 8.1 percent, a rate above the government's target as indicated by the National Bureau of Statistics. Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the pandemic, China became the leading figure in the war against COVID-19. While attaching great importance to the fight against the pandemic, China began sharing information about COVID-19 with the international community and provided bilateral and multilateral assistance to other affected countries.

China was at the forefront in pushing for the waiver of patents on COVID-19 vaccines to allow other countries to manufacture the vaccine. Today, China, with a population of more than 1.4 billion, has administered approximately 3.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines. According to the latest statistics, about 1.2 billion people in China have been fully vaccinated and more than 800 million booster shots have been administered to residents.

However, according to the latest statistics from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 25.3 percent of the total population of about 1.4 billion people in Africa have been fully vaccinated. This means that the war on COVID-19 is still far from being won.

Nonetheless, we live in an interconnected world. The global economy must be open and goods and services need to be provided.

Thus, to keep the global industrial and supply chains secure and smooth, and to explore new drivers of economic growth, China has begun to gradually open its borders in a bid to facilitate cross-border trade and revamp the economy.

Additionally, China has increased healthcare resources, including hospital beds, promoted vaccination of citizens with a special focus on booster shots for the elderly, and stockpiled medicine and equipment to treat the virus.

China is implementing measures to help combat the pandemic to ensure a healthy environment that will create a perfect condition for sustainable development as the world recovers from COVID-19.

The author is executive director of the China-Africa Center at the Africa Policy Institute in Kenya.