How China Get Control Over The Coronavirus

The question now is whether the world can learn lessons from China's apparent success and whether the authoritarian government's massive lockouts and electronic surveillance would work in other countries. If you're in business for 20 or 30 years, you can't try to change tactics, "said Dr. Michael O'Brien, a Canadian epidemiologist who led the international team and briefed reporters in Beijing and Geneva last week on its findings.

Pic Credit: The Wall Street Journal

The report comes at a time when many epidemiologists now consider the coronavirus to be a pandemic, and there are also questions about what the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 will do once the country inevitably lifts its strict control measures and relaunches its economy. While Europe and the United States are locked in a fight against COVID-19, caused by another coronavirus, some of the countries that were affected early on by this virus have done a better job of fighting it back than China. 

South Korea, which has had an explosive outbreak since February, has aggressively shaken up its epidemic curve. China - which currently diagnoses more than 1,000 homecoming travelers and those infected at home - has not reported any new cases acquired domestically. 

Knowing that non-pharmaceutical initiatives, including social distancing and travel restrictions aimed at severing the transmission chain to prevent the virus from entering an exponential growth cycle, have bought success.

The World Health Organization, which in a report last month concluded that China's "bold approach has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic," praised the effort. Experts believe the aggressive use of quarantine is one of the most effective measures against the virus in the world's most populous country. China's response to the virus included quarantine in and around Beijing, as well as various methods of punishment and reward to promote compliance with such measures. 

In Wuhan, authorities converted a stadium and other facilities into mass quarantine centers and built more than a dozen makeshift hospitals to house patients with less severe symptoms. In early December 2019, we began to see reports that a mysterious new virus, not pneumonia, was infecting more people than the original coronaviruses in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Guangdong. 

In February, local officials ordered all residents of Wuhan, one of China's most populous cities, to stay home. On February 7, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that despite the coronavirus outbreak, China will continue to press ahead with efforts to contain the disease. Since then, no cases have been reported, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHC). 

In a report released late last month, the World Health Organization congratulated China on a "unique and unprecedented public health response" that could reverse the escalating cases. The key question is whether interventions in China were the main driver of the spread of the virus, says Dr. Michael O'Brien, an infectious disease professor at the University of California, San Francisco. In mid-January, doctors in Wuhan raised the alarm, but the authorities seemed ill-prepared to contain him. 

Nature spoke to epidemiologists about whether the blockade worked, whether it was enough to encourage people to avoid large gatherings, and whether other countries can learn from China's experience. 

In recent days, the number of new cases in China has surged to more than 100 a day, and on Monday China's National Health Commission reported the highest number of cases since authorities began tracking the outbreak in January. Despite the increase in cases, the number of new infections has fallen sharply in recent weeks, prompting some observers to draw lessons from Beijing. 

Officials say the outbreak has almost completely stalled in China's worst-hit Hubei province, home to the country's second-largest population. But Zhu and other sources claim Quick provided real-time information to the US and other government officials around the world, saying the Chinese government manipulated the release of information and made erroneous assessments. Quick left when he learned that his government-funded post, officially known as the National Center for Infectious Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), would be discontinued in September, the sources said. Zhu said embedded experts learned of the outbreak by email and developed a close relationship with their Chinese counterparts.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it first learned of the outbreak on December 31 in the United States, the world's second-largest market for the virus after China. The agency said the CDC team in Beijing now includes another American who is in temporary charge. Quick, an employee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was linked to China's disease control agency.

Still, the U.S. is using people like Quick as a point of contact on the ground, infection experts told Reuters. In recent weeks, China has announced drastic containment measures, including the deployment of more than 1,000 health workers to the capital, Beijing, and the use of anti-biotic equipment.