'Ambitious' response to epidemic receives praise

Visiting team advises nations to learn from strategies employed by China

To the global community grappling with new outbreaks of novel coronavirus pneumonia, a joint team of World Health Organization and Chinese experts has reinforced its call-to-action in a new report, advising them to learn from China's experiences in controlling the epidemic and prepare immediately to implement similar measures.

The joint team has praised the Chinese people's collective commitment and sacrifices, and endorsed the government's phased lifting of restrictions and resumption of production, according to the report released on Saturday, about a week after the team completed a nine-day China field trip.

"In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history," the report says.

However, the world is not ready, "in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China"－the only strategy so far proven to curb the rapidly escalating epidemic, according to the report.

In the absence of a vaccine or cure, the recommended strategy entails immediate detection of cases, rigorous tracing of close contacts, and community compliance with limiting travel and restricting movement.

" (The Chinese) have approached a brand-new virus that's never been seen before with very standard, old-fashioned public health tools and applied these with a rigor and innovation on a scale we've never seen in history," Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist and leader of the team's foreign expert panel, said last week at a media briefing.

The foreign panel, including experts from Japan, Germany, the United States and Russia, had landed in China harboring doubts about the feasibility and impact of such interventions, especially when the target virus is a respiratory pathogen that can spread rapidly and easily, and all age groups are susceptible to it.

But eventually, according to Aylward, the team came to unanimously agree that China has changed the course of a rapidly escalating outbreak that has recently plateaued and declined faster through "ambitious, agile and aggressive" containment efforts.

Liang Wannian, head of the joint team's Chinese expert panel, said: "What China has done is both resolute and agile and what the country has achieved is an example and a feat in the history of public health."

"China has shown that forceful non-pharmaceutical measures can effectively cut the virus's transmission, and we have boosted global confidence in controlling the disease," he said in an interview with China Central Television on Sunday afternoon.

The report also recognizes the commitment of the Chinese people and coordinated government efforts.

As of Friday, over 330 medical assistance teams consisting of more than 40,000 medical workers had been dispatched to Hubei, according to the National Health Commission.

With the mitigated risk of COVID-19 in China and emerging outbreaks in other countries, the report suggests that foreign countries that are seeing clusters of infections must rapidly adopt similar measures to "achieve a second line of defense "for global health.

Recovery rate grows

National Health Commission data released on Sunday again accentuates the overall nationwide slowdown of the disease, with 570 new infections reported in Hubei province on Saturday and three new confirmed cases elsewhere on the Chinese mainland.

The death toll rose by 35 on Saturday to 2,870. The cumulative number of infections in China stood at 79,824.

Another 2,623 patients were discharged from hospitals on Saturday, bringing the total of those cured to 41,625, surpassing for the first time the number of people under treatment at hospitals－tallied at 35,329 on the same day－according to the commission.

"The recovery rate has been increasing in the past week, with the national average reaching 51.2 percent," said the commission spokesman Mi Feng on Sunday. "This signifies that the epidemic situation is trending positively, medical treatment has yielded notable results and strain on the healthcare system has been eased."

The report urges other countries to reassess any travel or trade restrictions that go beyond the recommendations of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee. "China's rapid return to full connectivity with the world, and to full productivity and economic output, is vital to China and to the world," it says.