Grass-roots officials take lead role on the front line of Wuhan’s grid-by-grid battle against coronavirus
- Area controllers responsible for a thousand or so residents are playing a leading role in the fight to stop Covid-19 from spreading
- One of the officials says his duties involve delivering food and medicine and staying in constant contact with locals
“For the past 50 days or so I have been ending my days at midnight with swollen feet and three totally drained mobile phone power banks,” said Tom Ding, a grass-roots Communist Party member in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the Covid-19 outbreak started.
The 35-year-old has been a “grid controller” for the past five years, responsible for overseeing around 1,000 residents in the city’s Jiangan neighbourhood.
Ding is one of the 12,000 frontline foot soldiers in Wuhan, which is divided into more than 10,000 “grids” for monitoring and social control purposes.
Each grid is assigned a controller like Ding, who is responsible for keeping an eye on all activities in their assigned neighbourhoods and reporting any unusual activities to their bosses.
Following the outbreak, these grid controllers have been given the extra task of keeping an eye on residents’ health and ensuring they get the food and medicine they need.