Middle East and North Africa Overview

How China has handled the Pandemic

As the United States is struggling with the effects of coronavirus, I reflect on how China dealt with this issue as the number of their cases are decreasing. According to The Guardian, China took very intense measures to handle this pandemic. China’s decisions on dealing with this pandemic included have a strict social distancing policy, which resulted in a city-wide lockdowns in Wuhan and nearby cities for over a month. Chinese officials also monitored its citizens in order to make sure people were following its new policy. In order to prevent people from exiting their homes, there would be rewards for those who stayed inside, while people who disobeyed these new policies would be punished. Even though their policy was very aggressive, China “had changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.” China also took attacked this pandemic by converting large areas and stadiums into mass quarantine centers for people to go to when feeling sick. For those with less severe symptoms, Chinese authorities built roughly over a dozen extra hospitals to separate people based on the severity of their symptoms.

With China handling their coronavirus pandemic effectively, it couldn’t have been accomplished without extreme measures. From USA Today, China administrated a “zero contact policy.” The United States tried to implement a similar policy, but the reason China is past its coronavirus peak is because they made “zero conduct” exactly what that means. During late February, authorities went by every house to make sure people were healthy and staying inside, and they even made drones, where they would be in the sky watching signs of human life and telling people to go back home if they were spotted. Beijing made its “zero conduct policy” very extreme, by “closing all schools, forcing millions of people inside, quickly building more than a dozen vast temporary hospitals, deploying thousands of extra medical staff to Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province and meticulously testing and tracing anyone and everyone who may have encountered the virus.” China overall combated coronavirus by limiting public gatherings and limiting social interactions as much as possible, which only could have under these extreme precautions.

For how China was where the first case of coronavirus to take place in, Shanghai wasn’t nearly as impacted from the disease as other Chinese cities. Asian Review tells us the story of how Shanghai slowed down the coronavirus and how other cities learned from their success. For how susceptible Shanghai is to the coronavirus due to it being one of the largest cities in China, the city only had three deaths by the end of February. On January 3rd, Zhang Yongzhen received a sample from a patient with a fever, which originated from an unknown source in Wuhan. He and his team and the Shanghai Public Health Center noticed similar genomes that were in the SARS virus. This new virus was never seen in humans, so Zhang and his team began training doctors on how to deal with people with these virus given that the number of similar cases were increasing in nearby cities. Shanghai had one person with similar symptoms as their first patient, and she was isolated immediately. She tested for coronavirus, and was later released healthy nine days later. With having already dealt with past infectious disease outbreaks, Shanghai didn’t hesitate to take action when it came to preventing the spread of coronavirus. With Shanghai having many doctors and equipment to diagnose people quickly, coronavirus had a difficult time spreading compared to other Chinese cities. The former director of the Shanghai CDC stated "I feel that Shanghai did a good job, partly because the time it took from seeing the first symptoms to diagnosing the illness was as short as one day on average.” With Shanghai taking quick action ever since their first case in early January and having tests to determine whether patients were infected, that made other nearby Chinese cities handle this pandemic with more ease.

China took many precautions to deal with this pandemic, and even though some were too extreme where their methods were criticized by other countries, they handled coronavirus effectively compared to other countries. Here’s another quick link explaining some less extreme methods they took on how they handled this pandemic. China has dealt with coronavirus effectively where other countries are thinking about making similar policies. Hopefully everyone can start making safe decisions to help us deal with this pandemic as we don’t seem to have an ideal date where society will return to normal. Overall though, China handled this pandemic through intense social distancing policies and made sure people were truly quarantined.