Top Chinese virologists, who were invited to share their experience with Russian colleagues, have revealed how their country tackled Covid-19. They also urged governments to ‘get real’ about the unprecedented threat to humanity.
A medical task force was sent to Russia from China on a humanitarian mission last weekend. Two of its members gave their take on the developing pandemic in an exclusive interview with RT.
They warned that Covid-19, which has killed more than 120,000 people around the globe, must be taken seriously because of its contagiousness, the likes of which have rarely been seen before.
Wu Xiaomei, head of the Harbin State University clinic, another member of the mission, shed some light on how Chinese healthcare staff dealt with the epidemic. They developed a playbook for handling coronavirus patients, organizing them by their health status, she revealed to RT.
“When a patient is diagnosed with Covid-19, we define if they are in mild, moderate, in severe or critical condition,” explained the doctor. “Then we send them to different hospitals.”
According to Wu, treating severe or critical patients in one place “markedly” helped to decrease mortality. As for those in mild or moderate conditions, their therapy is focused on making sure “that they do not turn into severe ones.”
“It’s a new challenge to humanity,” warned Xu Songtao, deputy director of the Chinese CDC’s Virology Institute. Anyone can succumb to the disease, regardless of age, gender or race, the virologist stated.
With no vaccine or clinically approved medicine in sight, interrupting the transmission of the virus has been touted as the most efficient way of containing its spread.
For this reason, “governments should enforce strict measures and the media should tell people that it’s serious.”
China officially claims to have ‘flattened the curve’ by containing Covid-19. Previously, top officials reported that the country’s mortality rate had fallen as the number of patients recovering began to climb. But importing coronavirus from abroad is now becoming an issue, and health authorities have warned that the fight is far from over.
Meanwhile, Beijing has encouraged other countries to learn from the Chinese experience, given that its medics have garnered invaluable knowledge by saving thousands of people.
While in Moscow, the Chinese team were able to see how the Russian healthcare system is coping with the ongoing pandemic, which has infected over 21,000 people and claimed 170 lives so far.
As the peak of local pandemic is yet to come, Russia has to make sure that “there are enough hospitals and doctors out there, if the number of cases jumps in the coming two weeks,” Wu advised.
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