China’s aggressive measures have slowed the corona virus. They may not work in other countries.This how china fight’s against covid-19 from few days.
We can find empty beds in China now. A few weeks ago we have seen how the hospitals in china were overflowing with COVID-19 patients. But surprisingly the number of new cases reported each day has plummet the past few weeks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government had allowed 13 foreigners and 12 Chinese scientists to tour five cities in China to study the effect of the COVID-19 epidemic. The scientists who are part of the team were surprised to see the deaths drop down. The rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic, but China boldly approached the situation and brought a decline in COVID-19 cases across China .
Lessons to be learnt from China
The world can take lessons from China’s apparent success.
The massive lock downs and electronic surveillance measures imposed by an authoritarian government, because of which hundreds of thousands of people in China did not get COVID-19 because of this aggressive response.
The united mission by the China Government and the people was highly productive and gave a unique insight to stem the virus from spread within mainland China and globally. China had the strictest control measures and restarted its economy.
When China began its Mission it had 2478 new cases reported but has 206 new cases now.
The mission was Ambitious, Active, and Aggressive
A team was made and then that team was split into two groups. They traveled to the cities which were hardly hit. (Cities like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and the hardest hit city, Wuhan). They visited hospitals, laboratories, companies, wet markets selling live animals, train stations, and local government offices. All the people they met and spoke to had a sense of responsibility and an matching the mission and the things were being done on a war footing pace.
Team actually got the data about the people who were affected by the disease and then the group reviewed and compiled the data and found interesting facts , which helped them work better.
- They learned that about 80% of infected people had mild to moderate disease.
- 8% had severe symptoms
- 1% had life-threatening episodes of respiratory failure, septic shock, or organ failure.
- The case fatality rate was highest for people over age 80 (21.9%), and people who had heart disease, diabetes, or hypertension.
- Fever and dry cough were the most common symptoms.
- Surprisingly, only 4.8% of infected people had runny noses.
- Children made up a mere 2.4% of the cases, and almost none was severely ill.
- For the mild and moderate cases, it took 2 weeks on average to recover.
- Surprisingly only 0.14% of them were positive.
REMEDIAL MEASURES
Once they were clear with the data then the remedial measures were taken according to the intensity of the infection.
- Lockdown of Wuhan and nearby cities in Hubei province, which has put at least 50 million people under a mandatory quarantine since 23 January was the most dramatic—and controversial—measure .
- This measure has effectively prevented further exportation of infected individuals to the rest of the country.
- People voluntarily quarantined themselves and were monitored by appointed leaders in neighborhoods in all other regions of China.
- Chinese authorities also built two hospitals in Wuhan in just over 1 week.
- Health care workers from all over China were sent to the outbreak’s center.
- The government launched an unprecedented effort to trace contacts of confirmed cases.
- In Wuhan alone, more than 1800 teams of five or more people traced tens of thousands of contacts.
- Aggressive “social distancing” measures implemented in the entire country included canceling sporting events and shuttering theaters.
- Schools extended breaks that began in mid-January for the Lunar New Year.
- Many businesses closed shop. Anyone who went outdoors had to wear a mask.
- Two widely used mobile phone apps, AliPay and WeChat— allowed the government to keep track of people’s movements and even stop people with confirmed infections from traveling.
- Every person has sort of a traffic light system to monitor their movements.
- Color codes on mobile phones—in which green, yellow, or red designate a person’s health status.
- Guards at train stations and other checkpoints know who to let through.
- As a consequence of all of these measures, public life reduced.
- Infected people rarely spread the virus to anyone but members of their own household.
Once all the people in an apartment or home were exposed, the virus had nowhere else to go and chains of transmission ended. That’s how the epidemic truly came under control.
China achieved what many public health experts thought was impossible just by having clarity of the problem. The report which they compiled focused on understanding how containing the spread of a widely circulating respiratory virus. There was a combination of “good old social distancing and quarantining very effectively done because of that on-the-ground machinery at the neighborhood level, facilitated by AI [artificial intelligence] big data.
