Delivering goods to homes a priority task for Shanghai

Employees of online grocery service Dingdong Maicai sort fresh vegetables at a warehouse in Shanghai on Sunday. [ZHU XINGXIN/CHINA DAILY]

It has been nearly a month since Shanghai implemented a de facto citywide lockdown to cut the transmission chains of the novel coronavirus. Many families quarantined at home are running out of their stock of living materials.

Despite grassroots government departments' efforts to increase the supply of daily necessities, many Shanghai residents have had to adapt to a meager life in a shortage economy that the most prosperous city in China has not seen for more than 40 years.

That's why the Shanghai municipal authorities have over the past weekend called for the goods necessary for daily life to be supplied to residents by all means possible.

In fact, the city has a sufficient stock of goods, including fresh vegetables, the shortage of which is a focus of the complaints of the people, the challenge is delivering them to the households of more than 25 million residents under a strict virus control protocol that requires minimizing the movement of the population. It is not the last mile that is the biggest hurdle to overcome, but the last 100 meters.

It is unrealistic to rely on those civil servants at the community level, who have been working in an overloaded manner on the front line of the fight against the virus for a long time, to deliver the living materials from door to door on a regular basis.

Given that the megacity has not yet seen the peak of its infections, the solution to the logistics problem should not be a makeshift arrangement, but be based on a sustainable and well-organized model with sufficient professional hands.

As such, it is good to see that the Shanghai municipal authorities have given a green light to couriers to deliver the supplies of basic living materials for residents.

The city will also allow more wholesale markets, distribution hubs and e-commerce storage facilities to operate in strict accordance with epidemic prevention protocols.

With the whole logistics system revived, it is foreseeable that supplies of living materials will start reaching residents in the city in a more efficient way.