Eleven months after the first case of COVID-19 gave the impression in the city of Wuhan in central China, China’s global outside continues to accumulate infections at an alarming rate. The flu season technique increases tension in already tense medical systems.
In China, coronavirus has been widely contained. But to block their return from abroad, the country is taking unprecedented and questionable action toward its medical capabilities, tracking all imported instances, and conducting massive testing in cities where new sporadic instances are discovered.
On Friday, the U. S. reported nearly 100,000 new cases in an un married day, bringing the total number of cases to more than nine million, according to Johns Hopkins University. In Europe, a record number of new infections have forced countries such as the UK, France, Germany and Belgium to impose new national closures. In China, new teams of national bodies have been discovered in Qingdao and Kashgar, alarming experts that the fight against the pandemic may not end soon.
“We want to know that no position in the world can be separated from the rest of the world,” said Zhang Wenhong, Shanghai’s leading infectious disease specialist. “Until the global pandemic is over, the epidemic in China will not be fully resolved. “In April, Zhang predicted that a momentary wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world would likely occur after the fall.
Second wave worse than the first wave
While other people are increasingly tired of dressing in masks, social estating and hand hygiene after months of surveillance, many governments say they expect the wave of the moment to be worse than the first in the spring. season means more people are more likely to be inflated with influenza and COVID-19.
French President Emmanuel Macron has said that another 400,000 people will die from coronavirus if the country does nothing at a time that is “more fatal than the first. “The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been in the process ofBut it’s not the first time It now predicts that there will be up to 240,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States through November 7.
As the number of cases increases, so does the threat to China.
“Once an imported case has entered China, local epidemics are likely to occur,” said Pan Pinhua, professor and vice president of respiratory medicine and intensive care at Xiangya Hospital at South Central University in China’s Changsha city.
Part of the challenge for China is that the country has only 4 extensive care beds consisting of 100,000 people. In the United States, the figure was 34. 2 in 2015, according to an article published through the National Center for Biotechnological Information. Germany has 29. 2, according to an article published in the journal Intensive Medicine, founded with data from 2012. To avoid a restriction on medical resources, countries with low medical resources in line with the capita, such as China, will have to adopt strict prevention and strategy from the outset of an epidemic, according to some studies.
Evidence has shown that low temperatures promote the survival and transmission of the virus, which is why viral pneumonia and other respiratory infections sometimes peak in winter.
“Increased indoor activities in winter, closer human contact and poorer ventilation, with closed windows, create the possibility of the virus spreading,” said Jiang Qingwu, epidemiologist and former dean of Fudan University’s School of Public Health.
Unlike other respiratory viruses such as influenza that is basically spreading in winter, the pathogen COVID-19 has not shown a seasonal pattern, according to experts, adding the head of emergencies of the World Health Organization.
Double shot
More and more experts are warning about a potentially fatal mixture of COVID-19 and influenza. Both are contagious respiratory diseases and percentages of similar symptoms, such as fever, cough, pain and, infrequently, vomiting and diarrhea. A double blow would not only mean more, testing in patients with fever, but it would also make it more difficult to distinguish COVID-19 from influenza, delaying remedy and quarantine.
In late January, a patient from Beijing was admitted to a hospital with severe flu after testing negative for three COVID-19 tests. It was only after being connected to a fan that the patient was found to have tested positive for COVID-19 in a bronchoalveolar wash test, in which a bronchoscope is passed through the mouth or nose to collect fluid from the decreased respiratory system. as a typical case that was first diagnosed as influenza, but which referred to infection by both viruses.
The mixture of COVID-19 and influenza can lead to overpopulation in hospitals. WHO estimates that one billion more people worldwide get influenza each year. In the United States, the CDC estimates that there were 39 to 56 million cases of influenza. October 1, 2019 to April 4 of this year.
China reported 3. 54 million cases of influenza in 2019, with only 269 deaths, a figure scientists have long believed is underestimated because deaths from influenza pneumonia are not included in this figure. Research by Chinese scientists published in the medical journal Lancet Public Health in September 2019 revealed that there were between 84,200 and 92,000 influenza-related deaths in China per year.
Studies have shown that combined influenza and COVID-19 infections lead to more severe symptoms and a longer era of the disease. In an examination funded through the Italian Ministry of Health, the Municipal Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Rome found that in 37 cases of COVID-19 and influenza co-infection, all had clinical symptoms such as fever, cough and shortness of breath. Nine cases, or about a quarter, had acute respiratory misery syndrome with progressive impairment. Six patients required intensive care but recovered, while three died.
The moment when the wave of the pandemic is already sinking Europe into a medical crisis, with large care teams filling up to the breaking point. Frenchman Macron warned that “at this stage, we know that, whatever we do, only about 9,000 patients will be in resuscitation during mid-November, almost all of France’s capacity. “Belgium, which has doubled its extensive attention span, is running to make a decision about which patients in need deserve a bed.
China prepares
China has been preparing for a momentary wave this winter since the summer. In Lehan, the epicenter of China’s first epidemic, there are 4 makeshift hospitals that were established in February in gymnasiums and conference and exhibition centers to isolate and treat mild cases. Once an outbreak occurs, the hospital can care for up to 700 patients, said Ling Ruijie, vice president of hubei Provincial Hospital for Western and Integrated Chinese Medicine, guilty of one of the makeshift hospitals.
Hospitals in China have taken steps to reorganize their fever clinics, build quarantine shelters and hospitals for infectious diseases and medical supplies.
In Yunnan Province, southwest China, which borders Myanmar and faces a major threat of imported cases, the government plans to build 16 infectious disease hospitals at the city level and six hospitals in border counties. Guangxi’s government, on the border with Vietnam, has invested 500 million yuan ($74. 7 million) in the renovation and expansion of hospitals.
But capacity building doesn’t happen overnight, Shanghai expert Zhang Wenhong warned.
“Not all cities look like Shanghai,” Zhang said. “If there is an epidemic, the medical formula will be under pressure. “
Extinguisher’s approach
Here’s what China is doing after learning a hard lesson in Wuhan: in September, Ruili, a border town in Yunnan, declared a week-long blockade and examined the 200,000 citizens for coronavirus after two other people illegally entered the city from Myanmar. were found to have COVID-19.
Last month, Qingdao became the first national COVID-19 outbreak in China in several months. After a dozen cases were connected to a hospital, the east port city tested its 9. 4 million people in just five days.
During the latest domestic epidemic in far west China, Kashgar Prefecture began mass testing its entire population of 4. 75 million.
In Europe, Slovakia has the first country of its extension to conduct national testing on 5. 4 million people.
Aggressive control turned out to have worked in China. All new groups have been limited locally. By identifying asymptomatic cases and moving to block early transmission, mass control is the most productive approach, Said Pan of Xiangya Hospital at Central South University.
But some argue that this technique is too expensive and wastes medical resources. Wang Guangfa, a breathing specialist at Beijing University’s first hospital in Beijing who became inflamed with COVID-19 in January on his stopover in Wuhan and then recovered, said he disapproved of the blind mass Wuhan’s trials of its nearly 10 million citizens aimed to tell the world that the city was safe , larger than identifying asymptomatic cases, Wang said.
China aims to take all steps to return to 0 cases of COVID-19, a strategy that Feng Zijian, deputy director of China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calls a “fire extinguisher” approach. about vaccines, Feng said.
China is expanding the number of other people receiving experimental vaccines opposed to COVID-19. Two cities in the east will offer one to the general public and one biotechnology company will offer another for academics traveling abroad, even though clinical trials are still ongoing. to their protection and effectiveness.
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