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Through traditional public health measures, China has successfully contained the spread of COVID-19. While it has 19 percent of world's population, the country has reported only 0.05 percent of cases globally.
A serial of articles was published in December in the British Medical Journal by Chinese epidemiologists and experts involved in fighting COVID-19, exploring several key dimensions of China's response to the infection, including its testing and vaccination strategies, containment methods and the role of pandemic modeling and surveillance.
Tang Jinling, one of the authors and a top Chinese epidemiologist, thinks China's public health measures played a vital role in containing the spread of the coronavirus. Here are excerpts of Tang's interview with China Daily:
Question:
What is your judgment about the current status of the pandemic?
Tang: The appearance of the Omicron variant seems to be quickly changing the course of the pandemic. Omicron is extremely infectious, and in countries where the variant currently prevails will soon come to an end stage as population immunity increases due to natural infection and vaccination. In other words, the pandemic may end much sooner than we previously anticipated. This would leave us an important question: Are we prepared for a new world in which COVID-19 is endemic? How should we readjust our strategies by then?
Question:
Currently, what are the main challenges in controlling the epidemic in China?
Tang: Our current policy is to dynamically clear outbreaks. There are two major challenges: preventing imported infections and clearing outbreaks. The successful clearance of the 60-odd imported outbreaks since March 2020 have provided valuable experience. We are now confident that dynamic clearance can be successfully sustained. The major challenges are how we can make our prevention and control activities more precise and efficient so that we can reduce disturbances of people's living and economic development to a minimum.
Question:
What anti-epidemic measures and policies that China has pursued can be learnt by other countries?
Tang: China has adopted a containment policy and thus uses highly stringent measures to fight the pandemic. This policy differs a lot from other countries and is unlikely able to be copied wholesale by other countries that didn't intend to contain the epidemic from the beginning. However, China's experience is still valuable for these countries in regard to mobilizing public health measures to flatten the epidemic curve to avoid hospital stress. Importantly, China has successfully proved that — in the absence of vaccines and drugs — conventional public health measures assisted by modern communication technologies and nucleic acid testing can work to eradicate an emerging infectious disease with pandemic potential within the place where it started. This is a history-making event and will change our view and strategy for future emerging infectious diseases.
Question:
What are the pros and cons of conventional public health measures in pandemic control?
Tang: At the beginning of an infectious disease outbreak, there are no vaccines or drugs that can be used. Public health measures are the only effective tools we can mobilize. They alone are effective enough in containing a new epidemic. However, public health measures should be used wholeheartedly and to maximum effect. The effective application of public health measures will also make time for development of vaccines and drugs. Otherwise, if the epidemic is not contained locally and long-term public health measures have to be used, interference with people's lives and economy — and its costs — would become too large to be sustainable. In addition, public health measures can also be used effectively to flatten the epidemic curve to avoid hospital stress.
Question:
From SARS to MERS and COVID-19,it seems that we are at increasing risk from emerging infectious diseases. Why is this so? Any hints from that — like how humans should co-exist with nature?
Tang: This is not an area with which I am very familiar. Obviously these diseases are all passed from animals to humans. Recently, they seemed to have occurred rather often. One possible reason may be our more frequent and closer contact with animals. Another reason is probably our advances in laboratory science, which have made discovery of such diseases easier and quicker. There might well have been many small outbreaks of new infectious diseases in the long history of mankind, but we just did not discover them before they completely disappeared.
Question:
Based on your personal interaction with foreign peers, how do they view China's overall anti-COVID effort? Any twists or turns in their recognizing China's approaches?
Tang: China's strategy is very successful and highly recognized in the world. But many countries and nations cannot simply copy China because of different cultural, political and economic contexts in which a containment policy is not acceptable or feasible. Having said that, China's experience in mobilizing public health tools can surely be copied partially to achieve different goals in epidemic control.
About the interviewee
Tang Jinling is chair professor of epidemiology at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He earned his bachelor's degree at Peking University in 1982 and completed his doctoral research at the University of London. His research covers epidemiology and evidence-based medicine. Tang is also professor emeritus of epidemiology at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Reporter: Ye Zizhen
Editors: Shan Juan, Wang Jianfen
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