While the planet is struggling to regulate COVID-19, China has managed to regulate the pandemic rapidly and effectively. How was that possible? Talha Burki reports.
On Sept 22, 2020, US President Donald Trump gave a combative address to the UN General Assembly pertaining to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) because the “China virus”. He demanded that China was held in charge of “unleash[ing] this plague onto the world”. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who addressed the overall Assembly after Trump, urged nations suffering from COVID-19 to “follow the guidance of science...and launch a joint international response to beat this pandemic”. He added that “any attempt of politicising the difficulty or stigmatisation must be rejected”. 9 days later, Trump tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
According to a July survey by the Pew research facility , two-thirds of usa citizens believe that China has done a nasty job handling the COVID-19 pandemic. it's clearly not an opinion shared by WHO. during a news conference in September, Mike Ryan, executive of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, offered “deepest congratulations...to the front-line doctors in China and therefore the population who worked together tirelessly to bring the disease to the present very low level”.
As of Oct 4, 2020, China had confirmed 90 604 cases of COVID-19 and 4739 deaths, while the USA had registered 7 382 194 cases and 209 382 deaths. the united kingdom features a population 20 times smaller than China, yet it's seen five times as many cases of COVID-19 and almost ten times as many deaths. All of which raises the question: how has China managed to wrest control of its pandemic?
Despite being the primary place to be hit by COVID-19, China was well-placed to tackle the disease. it's a centralised epidemic response system. Most Chinese adults remember SARS-CoV and therefore the high deathrate that was related to it. “The society was very alert on what can happen during a coronavirus outbreak”, said Xi Chen (Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut, USA). “Other countries don't have such fresh memories of a pandemic”. Ageing parents tend to measure with their children, or alone but nearby. Only 3% of China's elderly population sleep in care homes, whereas in several western countries, such facilities are major sources of infection.
“The speed of China's response was the crucial factor”, explains Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota, USA). “They moved very quickly to prevent transmission. Other countries, albeit that they had for much longer to organize for the arrival of the virus, delayed their response which meant they lost control”. the primary reported cases of the disease that came to be referred to as COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, Hubei province, in late December 2019. China released the genomic sequence of the virus on Jan 10, 2020, and commenced enacting a raft of rigorous countermeasures later within the same month.
Wuhan was placed under a strict lockdown that lasted 76 days. conveyance was suspended. Soon afterwards, similar measures were implemented in every city in Hubei province. Across the country, 14 000 health checkpoints were established at conveyance hubs. School re-openings after the winter vacation were delayed and population movements were severely curtailed. Dozens of cities implemented family outdoor restrictions, which usually meant that just one member of every household was permitted to go away the house every few days to gather necessary supplies. Within weeks, China had managed to check 9 million people for SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. It found out an efficient national system of contact tracing. against this , the UK's capacity for contact tracing was overwhelmed soon after the pandemic struck the country.
As the world's largest manufacturer of private protective equipment, it had been relatively straightforward for China to build up production of clinical gowns and surgical masks. Moreover, the Chinese readily adopted mask wearing. “Compliance was very high”, said Chen. “Compare that with the USA, where even in June and July, when the virus was surging, people were still refusing to wear masks. Even in late September, President Trump still treated Joe Biden's mask-wearing as a weakness to be ridiculed”.
Drones equipped with echoing loudspeakers rebuked Chinese citizens who weren't following the principles . The state-run Xinhua press agency has released footage taken from the drones. “Yes Auntie, this drone is lecture you”, one device proclaimed to a surprised woman in Inner Mongolia . “You shouldn't walk around without wearing a mask. You'd better head home and do not forget to scrub your hands”. In the UK, 150 000 people were permitted to attend a racing meet in mid-March, 10 days before the country went into lockdown. In August, 460 000 Americans congregated in Sturgis, South Dakota , for a motorbike rally.
On Febr 5, 2020, Wuhan opened three so-called Fangcang hospitals. Another 13 would seem over subsequent few weeks. The hospitals were established within public venues like stadiums and exhibition centres and were wont to isolate patients with mild-to-moderate symptoms of COVID-19. Patients who began to show symptoms of severe disease were quickly transferred to standard hospitals. The network of Fangcang hospitals, which held 13 000 beds, meant that patients with COVID-19 didn't need to isolate reception , which reduced the danger of relations becoming infected. By Mar 10, 2020, the Fangcang hospitals were not needed. From round the same time, the main target of China's countermeasures shifted from controlling local transmission to preventing the virus from grasping as a results of imported cases. those that entered the country were tested and quarantined.
A modelling study co-authored by Chen calculated that the general public health actions undertaken by China between Jan 29 and Feb 29 may have prevented 1·4 million infections and 56 000 deaths. Still, it doesn't necessarily follow that China's response to the pandemic is generalisable. “As each country has its own health system and epidemic curve, measures implemented in one country might not be easily replicated by another”, points out Imperial College London's Han Fu. “Other factors like coordination between government sectors and civil compliance with regulations can also affect the effectiveness of the response”. Much also depends on each nation's conception of civil liberties.
“In China, you've got a mixture of a population that takes respiratory infections seriously and is willing to adopt non-pharmaceutical interventions, with a government which will put bigger constraints on individual freedoms than would be considered acceptable in most Western countries”, adds Poland. “Commitment to the greater good is engrained within the culture; there's not the hyper-individualism that characterises parts of the USA, and has driven most of the resistance to the countermeasures against the coronavirus.” Poland noted that the Chinese accept the notion that disease control may be a matter of science. “China doesn't have the type of raucous anti-vaccine, anti-science movement that's trying to derail the fight against COVID-19 within the USA”, he said.
In August, Wuhan hosted a huge pool party. there have been objections from some foreign media outlets. The state-owned Global Times was unapologetic. It suggested that the event stood as “a reminder to countries grappling with the virus that strict preventive measures have a payback”. The newspaper quoted an area resident who back in April had feared he could be bankrupted by the pandemic. “There weren't even many local people, to not mention tourists. But now my business is blooming with the town having fully recovered”, he said.
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