Uzbek architect reassured by China's scientific epidemic response measures

CHONGQING, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- Rustam Irgashev, who works and lives in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, is planning to fly to Saudi Arabia to work on new projects. The architect is happy to be back at his job, dealing with a pile of work.

Irgashev, 35, from Uzbekistan, is an architect working for China's CCTEG Chongqing Engineering (Group) Co., Ltd., where he has long been responsible for the company's overseas projects.

"Beset by the COVID-19 pandemic, we could not conduct field investigations. Most of the time, we communicated with our partners online, and the work was not progressing smoothly," Irgashev recalled.

However, as China adjusts its COVID-19 response policies, the Uzbek architect can now promote shelved projects overseas, which "is of great help to the work."

China has recently announced that it would downgrade its management of the infectious disease of COVID-19 from Class A to Class B starting from Jan. 8, shifting the focus of the response from stemming infection to caring for health and preventing severe cases.

Accordingly, domestic and foreign airlines will operate scheduled passenger flights under bilateral transport agreements, with limits on flights no longer applicable. Closed management, nucleic acid testing, and quarantine measures for inbound flight crews and related airport personnel will be removed.

Irgashev believes that with the evolution and changes of the virus, China has opened up in an orderly manner, and this "rational, prepared and planned decision" is relatively safe for people.

Having lived through the entire three years of the epidemic in China, Irgashev says that life in the country is generally safe. He and his family were recently infected with COVID-19 but recovered soon after several days of discomfort.

"The current Omicron variant is less dangerous than the virus at the beginning of the outbreak," Irgashev said.

This is Irgashev's ninth year living in Chongqing. He chose to stay in the city after graduating from Chongqing University with a master's degree in 2014.

"The country is a mixture of the ancient and the modern," the Uzbek said. He did not expect that China's architectural design and economic development would come as such a surprise.

Besides finding a job, he started a family and had a daughter in Chongqing. It also made him pay special attention to the health of his family. He and his family were vaccinated last year, as recommended by the government.

Looking back on China's COVID-19 responses in recent years, Irgashev believes that "accurate" and "scientific" are two keywords.

"In the early stage of the epidemic when the virus was fierce, Chongqing responded in time to control the spread of the disease in a short time, and people's lives were well protected," he recalled.

Now, the local government has made a scientific adjustment to the epidemic response. Irgashev believes this is "rational and the result of a lot of testing."