An international team of WHO doctors visited China and returned very impressed with what they saw:
Chinese hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients a few weeks ago now have empty beds. Trials of experimental drugs are having difficulty enrolling enough eligible patients. And the number of new cases reported each day has plummeted the past few weeks.
These are some of the startling observations in a report released on 28 February from a mission organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government that allowed 13 foreigners to join 12 Chinese scientists on a tour of five cities in China to study the state of the COVID-19 epidemic and the effectiveness of the country’s response. The findings surprised several of the visiting scientists. “I thought there was no way those numbers could be real,” says epidemiologist Tim Eckmanns of the Robert Koch Institute, who was part of the mission.
But the report is unequivocal. “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” it says. “This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real.”
The decline is not simply real but dramatic:
On 10 February, when the advance team of the WHO-China Joint Mission began its work, China reported 2478 new cases. Two weeks later, when the foreign exerts packed their bags, that number had dropped to 409 cases. (Yesterday, China reported only 206 new cases, and the rest of the world combined had almost nine times that number.)
Today, a day later, new cases dropped strongly again, to just 125, and these include an increasing number of people infected abroad (mainly Iran). Of a total of over 80,000 infected, a little over 30,000 remain classified as active cases. The situation is still serious (of the 30,000, probably still hundreds will die), but the situation is clearly under control. Even after the criminally irresponsible behaviour of local authorities after the initial outbreak led to uncontrolled expansion, it looks like in the end, less than 0.01% of China’s vast population will be affected by a highly contagious disease.
The way this was achieved is detailed in the linked article and even more in the original study linked from there; here is the gist of it:
“As a consequence of all of these measures, public life is very reduced,” the report notes. But the measures worked. In the end, infected people rarely spread the virus to anyone but members of their own household, Leung says. 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,” Leung says. In sum, he says, 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.”
The problem for us is that these police-state-supported measures are unlikely to be reproduced in the West or in third-world countries.
How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable. “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development: “No one else in the world really can do what China just did.”
The good thing is that the article mentions where else we could look for models to follow:
“To me, as somebody who has spent a lot of time in China, it comes across as incredibly naïve—and if not naïve, then willfully blind to some of the approaches being taken,” Phelan says. Singapore and Hong Kong may be better examples to follow, Konyndyk says: “There has been a similar degree of rigor and discipline but applied in a much less draconian manner.”