Commentary: "Best place" in COVID resilience ranking fails to address livelihood challenges

BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) -- The United States jumped to the No.1 spot in Bloomberg's latest COVID-19 resilience ranking. How can a country with over 600,000 coronavirus deaths become "the best place to be" during a global pandemic?

Unlike previous rankings, the latest index takes into account "reopening progress," which includes factors like vaccination progress, lockdown severity, flight capacity, and vaccinated travel routes. However, critical indicators like the number of confirmed cases and death toll are removed from the index.

With the Delta variant spreading across the globe and the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, people cannot stop wondering whether this ranking, focusing on reopening and relaxing restrictions, really stands for the interests of the people.

As Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, the so-called ranking "makes black look white and white look black," which will "only be shrugged off by people around the world." Without considering people's actual needs, this ranking will definitely not gain support from the people.

In fact, putting political expediency above people's lives is exactly one of the main reasons why the United States, as a country boasting the world's most advanced medical technologies, responded so poorly to the pandemic.

Instead of focusing efforts on saving lives, some U.S. politicians have been hyping up the "lab leak" theory to blackmail China on COVID-19 origin tracing, in an attempt to shift the blame to others before the American people hold them accountable for their recklessness in handling the pandemic.

Nevertheless, political manipulation is doomed to fail as it can neither fool the world nor cover up the truth. Only by putting people's lives and health front and center can it defeat the virus.