China’s experience in containing the spread of the new coronavirus could serve as a lesson for other countries now facing the COVID-19 pandemic, a senior official with the World Health Organization (WHO) has told UN News in an in-depth interview.
While more than 153,00 cases of the respiratory illness have been recorded globally as of Sunday, it is on the decline in China, demonstrating that the course of the outbreak there has been altered, according to WHO Representative in the country, Dr. Gauden Galea.
It is an epidemic that has been nipped as it was growing and stopped in its tracks. This is very clear from the data that we have, as well as the observations that we can see in society in general, he told UN News in the capital, Beijing, on Saturday.
So that’s a big lesson: that the natural course of the outbreak does not need to be a very high peak that overwhelms health services. This lesson in containment, therefore, is a lesson that other countries can learn from and adapt for their own circumstances.
Dr. Galea praised the timely cooperation with the National Health Commission, its counterpart in the country. Early and frequent exchanges resulted in sharing of the genetic sequence of the virus, as well as the specifications for designing tests so other countries would be able to identify it.
The biggest conclusion is that China has demonstrated that the course of the outbreak can be altered. Normally, an outbreak of this nature would have exponential growth, would reach a high peak, and would then decline naturally once all susceptible people have been infected, or developed the disease. This has not happened in China in a number of ways, he said.
One: the shape of the course of the events – the graph, the epidemic curve, as we call it, of the numbers of cases over time – appears very unnatural. It is an epidemic that has been nipped as it was growing and stopped in its tracks. This is very clear from the data that we have, as well as the observations that we can see in society in general.
“So, that’s a big lesson that the natural course of the outbreak does not need to be a very high peak that overrwhelms health services. This lesson in containment, therefore, is a lesson that other countries can learn from and adapt for their own circumstances”.
United Nations