Changes in clear assignment of departmental responsibilities for major epidemic prevention and control in the Chinese Mainland before and after COVID-19 epidemic: an analysis on official documents

ObjectiveTo examine the variation in clearly documented assignment of departmental responsibilities for major epidemic prevention and control in the Chinese mainland before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. MethodsOfficial policy documents related to major epidemic prevention and control issued by administrative agencies of 31 provincial level administrative divisions from 2000 through 2020 were systematically retrieved online from websites of the agencies. The extracted information on the coverage, clarification and assessability of the assigned departmental responsibilities for major epidemic prevention and control were analyzed; T-test and paired rank sum test were adopted in statistical analysis. ResultsBased on relevant information extracted from the 3 864 policy documents retrieved, the nationwide average proportion of the departments with officially assigned responsibility versus all departments at provincial level increased significantly from 80.93% (18.61/23.00) in 2019 to 89.62% (20.61/23.00) in 2