China’s coronavirus response the ‘most ambitious’ in history

The World Health Organisation has praised the ‘all-government, all-society approach’ taken by China to halt the coronavirus.

A robot is rolled out to disinfect the streets of Hangzhou in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. Picture: AFP

The World Health Organisation has praised the “all-government, all-society approach” taken by China to halt the coronavirus, but still fears it could become a pandemic as it spreads through Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Canadian epidemiologist Bruce Aylward, who led the WHO’s two-week inspection tour of China’s response to COVID-19, singled out Wuhan, where the population of almost 11 million is still under quarantine. “The world is in your debt,” Dr Aylward said in Beijing.

The coronavirus has in recent days quickly spread across the world, with more than 80,000 confirmed cases and almost 2700 deaths across at least 35 countries, leading WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyes to warn governments to “prepare for a potential pandemic”.

Fears of a pandemic — when an illness spreads at significant scale across numerous countries — has rattled financial markets. South Korea, which has the largest number of cases outside China, reported 60 new infections and one more fatality on Tuesday, raising its death toll to eight and total patients to nearly 900.

The US Centres for Disease Control raised its caution level to warn Americans against “all non-essential travel to South Korea”.

Italy, which has reported seven deaths and more than 200 cases, has locked down 11 towns, while upcoming football matches in its Serie A and the Europa League will be played behind closed doors.

At least 12 people have died in Iran, the highest toll outside China, and there are concerns the situation may be worse than ­officially acknowledged.

Michael Ryan, head of WHO’s health emergencies program, said a team from the UN agency would arrive in Iran on Tuesday. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions about the mortality rate. Iran “may only be detecting severe cases” because the epidemic was still at an early stage, he said.

 

New COVID-19 cases were also found in Afghanistan, ­Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait and Oman.

The Chinese government has been sensitive assessments of the WHO, the peak public health body, as criticism has spread domestically and internationally about a cover-up by officials in Hubei in the three weeks after the coronavirus was first detected.

Dr Aylward acknowledged that many people had been sceptical about the case numbers released by Chinese officials. “I know people look at the numbers and say ‘what’s really happening?’ ” he said at a joint briefing with China’s ­National Health Commission.

But he said the opinion of the WHO team was that case numbers were now falling because of China’s “all-government, all-­society approach”, which he ­described as “probably the most ambitious and agile” in history.

“Very rapidly, multiple sources of data pointed to the same thing. This is falling and it’s falling ­because of the actions that are being taken,” he said.

There had been concerns among international health experts that the Chinese government might repeat the unco-operative approach a similar investigation team from the WHO experienced during the 2003 SARS epidemic. In 2003, a WHO investigation team was kept waiting in Beijing for more than two weeks before being allowed to meet local scientists. It was later revealed that Beijing officials even moved SARS patients from hospitals that the WHO team visited in an attempt to downplay the crisis.

Additional reporting: AFP