From Bureaucratic Coordination to a Data-Driven Model: Transformation and Capacity Building of Community-Based Prevention and Control of Public Health Events

Communities are the first line of defense in responding to major public health events. Taking the community-based prevention and control cases of COVID-19 in China as samples, this paper constructs an analytical framework for the generation of community-based prevention and control capacity of public health events from the perspective of governance elements optimization based on the methods of text analysis and limits-to-growth archetype analysis. According to the research, the community-based prevention and control of public health events realizes the integration of governance elements of key actors through the bureaucratic coordination mode and maximizes the prevention and control efficiency with the primary goal of epidemic prevention and control in a short period of time, which presents a “reinforcing feedback” loop in the “limits-to-growth” model system. However, with the development of the epidemic showing a strong trend of being latent and wide spread, the “reinforcing feedback” from the bureaucratic coordination model on the effect of epidemic prevention and control encounters the “regulatory feedback” that inhibits the growth at the data-driven level. On the basis of discussing the practice of the public health prevention and control mode in the grassroots communities under the established political framework, this paper attempts to construct an institutional reform system from technological governance to technological empowerment, so as to effectively realize the mode transformation of community-based prevention and control of public health events.