China’s outbreak efforts resonate around globe
Print Edition
THE pedestrian path at the foot of the Acropolis hill in the heart of Athens was lit red on Friday evening for an hour.
Hundreds of Greeks and Chinese people living in Greece held a gathering and walked around the neighborhood holding Chinese red lanterns to express solidarity with China in the fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) outbreak.
“The world should show gratitude to the Chinese people for their courage and sacrifices in battling the disease decisively and in preventing its spread to other countries,” said Fotis Provatas, president of the Chamber of Greek-Chinese Economic Cooperation, which organized the event.
China has so far contained more than 99 percent of the confirmed cases within its borders.
Since the outbreak, China has been taking decisive and unprecedented measures, including locking down cities, to protect public health both domestically and globally.
Thanks to the self-imposed sacrifices, there has so far not been a major global outbreak.
“We appreciate and we admire all this gigantic effort, their determination and discipline, because they know that this is the only way to help themselves and the world from the further spread of the epidemic,” Provatas said.
For Mario Cavolo, an Italian American writer living in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, his family have to change their basketball routine on the weekend now by holding it indoors as part of local community efforts to control the outbreak.
“If you think about the responsibility of a dutiful citizen, 1.4 billion people in China have to stay at home, doing what should be done — not spreading the virus. It’s amazing,” said Cavolo, who has been living in China with his wife and child for years.
In the neighborhood where Cavolo lives, local security guards make extra efforts to register residents and take residents’ body temperatures at the entrance of each residential community. “Our family realizes that we have to follow these strict rules because we are part of the community, to protect each other,” he said.
Unprecedented moves
While implementing the strictest measures to prevent and control the disease across the country, China is also cooperating with the international community to prepare other countries for a potential outbreak and prevent the epidemic from growing.
Michael Tiberi works with a company making LED masks in Las Vegas, Nevada, where local life is hardly affected by the epidemic. He appreciates China’s anti-epidemic efforts, saying “the quarantine seems to be working well to reduce the spread of the virus and contain it in specific areas.”
“If it weren’t for China’s efforts, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher,” said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus earlier this month.
Since the outbreak, China has implemented the most comprehensive and rigorous measures to prevent and control the spread of the virus.
Wuhan City, an important transportation hub in central China and capital of Hubei Province, has been in lockdown since January 23, with all public transportation suspended. Several other cities in Hubei have followed suit.
To improve treatment capacity, tens of thousands of workers were mobilized to build two makeshift hospitals in Wuhan with a total of 2,600 beds for patients in serious condition. The construction of each took only 10 days.
A total of 217 medical teams with 25,633 medical personnel had been sent to Hubei as of Friday, with a massive influx of equipment and supplies.
The unprecedented moves have yielded positive results. By the end of Saturday, the daily new confirmed cases of the disease outside Hubei had fallen for 12 days in a row, with the overall confirmed cases on the Chinese mainland reaching 68,500, according to the National Health Commission.
By Saturday, a total of 1,665 people had died of the virus while 9,419 people had been discharged from hospital.
Nancy Messonnier, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said: “China has certainly taken aggressive action to try to mitigate the spread of this virus.”
The progress is hard won by all sides and is fully recognized by the international community. So far, more than 160 leaders of foreign governments and organizations have expressed support for China.
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