Corona Virus, What’s next for China?
We have all known China for a long time now and more recently because of the coronavirus endemic in its province Hubei in Wuhan. As of now, the spread of the respiratory pathogen is highly contained in China. All thanks to the communist government that deployed a strategy so strong that the virus has been finally contained in the Chinese mainland. It was also prevented from spreading in the rest of China, but what after now? Before that let us have a look at some stark statistics.
The measures taken were agile, aggressive and ambitious and moreover they were employed at the end of January itself. Today, Iran, Italy and South Korea have far exceeded the total number of cases in China and the numbers are rising gradually and then exponentially. The main reason for these other countries experiencing such an epidemic that has now become a pandemic is the over-negligence on behalf of the governments of these countries. When they estimated only fifty cases there were already hundreds, thousands or even more cases already there and even more brewing. When the actual numbers were reported altogether it suddenly jolted the leaders into a helpless situation and they had to declare a temporary lockdown to cut down the chain reaction. The kind of methodology adopted by the Chinese so that once a person is affected, the virus travels to his family only and then after a quarantine of 15 days, the chain is cut down and the effect of the virus is curtailed.
The rate at which the number of positive cases has plummeted is astonishing and was confirmed by the World Health Organizations’ officials. The officials also reviewed the data compiled by the Chinese scientists (The country still accounts for more than 90% of the global total of the 90,000 confirmed cases.)They learned that about 80% of infected people had mild to moderate disease, 13.8% had severe symptoms, and 6.1% had life-threatening episodes of respiratory failure, septic shock, or organ failure. The case fatality rate was highest for people over age 80 (21.9%), and people who had heart disease, diabetes, or hypertension. Fever and dry cough were the most common symptoms. Surprisingly, only 4.8% of infected people had runny noses. Children made up a mere 2.4% of the cases, and almost none was severely ill. For the mild and moderate cases, it took 2 weeks on average to recover.
The study conducted by WHO mainly focuses on understanding how China was able to contain the spread of a widely circulating respiratory disease. The most dramatic — and controversial — measure was the lockdown of Wuhan and nearby cities in Hubei province, which has put at least 50 million people under a mandatory quarantine since 23 January. In other regions of mainland China, people voluntarily quarantined and were monitored by appointed leaders in neighborhoods. Chinese officials also built 2 hospitals in just 1 week to handle the exponential number of positive cases being diagnosed every day in January. Workers were sent from all over China to work dedicatedly to building the hospitals. The government launched an unprecedented effort to trace contacts of confirmed cases. In Wuhan alone, more than 1800 teams of five or more people traced tens of thousands of contacts.
The technology was also employed to track anybody who was positively tested to keep a check on the number of contacts that a person had. Two apps — AliPay and WeChat — which have helped China to phase out paper currency also help to track down such people. They act as traffic lights for people and there are red, green and yellow signals indicating a person’s health status which helps the vigil officers to decide who to let through and who not to. That is how it all came under control — 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.
Although China has potentially contained the spread of the virus right now it has mostly been a time of lockdown for it. When the country resumes rebuilding its economy, the virus might come back with a harder and larger impact.
Will the same strategy work for others too?
How feasible and successful these methods are in other countries is debatable as of now because China is a country where imposing such a stringent act of surveillance is highly possible. The country also has the ability to do large scale labor-intensive works in a short span of time given the gravity of the situation. The report produced by WHO does emphasize to improve on certain areas like the areas where China has not been quite open about all of its methods. It is silent about the coercive nature of the policies it implemented and the toll it has calculated. Similar measures are also being taken in Singapore and Hong Kong but in a lesser draconian manner. What China has done is like suppressing fire and not putting it out completely. It will obviously come roaring back. We now have an unprecedented opportunity to see how China would deal with the resurgence of COVID-19.
