A combination of Chinese traditional medicine, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven technology, deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional personnel, robust party machinery backed by leadership helped China to fight COVID-19, said Consul General of China in Kolkata Zha Liyou.
Since the outbreak in December, Mr Zha and his colleagues in Kolkata, closest among Indian metro cities to Hubei province where initial cases were reported, monitored the situation closely. Mr Zha says that “the situation is under control.”
“The significant symbol of improvement is traffic snarls are back in the main cities like Shanghai or Beijing,” Mr Zha said.
In China – like in many parts of the world – coastal areas in east or south east China are more prosperous to the land locked areas in the west and thus majority of migrant workers usually move from west to east or south for work. They went to their home in the western or central areas to celebrate Chinese New Year in February and their return to work place was delayed owing to COVID outbreak.
“But for last one or two weeks, workers are back in large numbers; about 70% in big manufacturing and infrastructure projects and about 30-35% in small and medium businesses,” he said.
“The industry and the government chartered point-to-point bullet trains, planes and buses to transport the workers so that massive infrastructure projects – the backbone of China – and production can be facilitated as fast as possible [since] we lost nearly two months of production due to New Year and Corona outbreak,” said Mr Zha, a diplomat with expertise in business development. Following the outbreak in December, it took China about a month and a half to contain it.
“Firstly the neighborhoods were segregated and peoples’ movement from one to another neighbourhood was stopped. Thus we were able to trace and identify contacts and confirmed cases,” said Mr Zha.
Communist party’s intervention
Another of those non-medical interventions was to engage the Communist Party’s robust grass root networks of four million workers and volunteers, alongside health workers, to identify affected cases. The residents were also encouraged to report to the hospital and have self-quarantine, new hospitals were set up overnight to deal with patients. In the next stage, technology was used to map the nature of the movement of the patients.
“Once a person buys a bullet train ticket, we know where the passenger boarded and got down. We further used AI and robotics to map the routine and movement of the confirmed patient and then alerted others that if they were boarded particular train or bus with the identified patient then they have a high risk of catching the ailment and [they] should report to hospital and many did,” said Mr Zha.
He feels this combination of human effort and technology “can be explained to other countries which could be beneficial” in case of a global outbreak.
Traditional Chinese medicine’s role
“We extensively used traditional Chinese medicine [TCM] and combined it with modern medicine and therapy to treat patients,” Mr Zha said.
Some of top TCM research and education institutions dispatched three national teams with 334 people to fight COVID-19. By the middle of February, total 220 TCM professionals were based in Hubei alone. According to Xu Nanping, a Vice-Minister of Science and Technology, about 85 per cent of patients were given the combined treatment of TCM and modern medicine. The experiment was successful, feels Mr. Zha.
New cases are only trickling in over last two weeks and Dr. Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organisation (WHO), who toured the country with a team, said in an interview this week to New York Times that “rapidly escalating outbreak has plateaued and come down faster” than expected and “hundreds of thousands” did not contract Covid-19 because of governments’ “aggressive response.”
Mr. Zha, “thanked” friends in east India for “support and interest to get updated” about China.
“We monitored situation rigorously – using social media and personal contact – to give a clear picture to our friends,” noted Mr Zha.
