Objective To 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.

Methods Official 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.

Results Based 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 2020 (P < 0.05); the average proportion of the departments with the assessable responsibility versus all departments with the assigned responsibility increased from 26.16% (4.81/18.61) to 30.93% (6.39/20.61) and the average proportion of the departments with the specified responsibility versus all departments with the assigned responsibility also increased significantly from 44.00% to 54.58%; but the average proportion of the departments with clearly specified responsibility was not significantly improved. In 2020, the nationwide average proportion of the provincial departments with officially assigned responsibility increased significantly to 87.10% and 20.97% for the professional departments and the key support departments (P < 0.05), while the proportion for other support departments was not significantly different from that in 2000.

Conclusion The degree of clearly documented assignment of departmental responsibilities for major epidemic prevention and control in China has been significantly improved after the outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic but the assessability of the assigned departmental responsibilities need to be improved.