Friday, 29 March, 2024
HomeCoronavirus WatchChina's CDC head says 'biggest mistake' is failure to use masks

China's CDC head says 'biggest mistake' is failure to use masks

Chinese scientists at the front of that country’s outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have not been particularly accessible to foreign media, says a Science report. Many have been overwhelmed trying to understand their epidemic and combat it, and responding to media requests, especially from journalists outside of China, has not been a top priority.

Science has tried to interview George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for 2 months. Last week he responded.

Gao oversees 2000 employees – one-fifth the staff size of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention – and he remains an active researcher himself. In January, he was part of a team that did the first isolation and sequencing of severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. He co-authored two widely read papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that provided some of the first detailed epidemiology and clinical features of the disease, and has published three more papers on COVID-19 in The Lancet.

His team also provided important data to a joint commission between Chinese researchers and a team of international scientists, organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO), that wrote a landmark report after touring the country to understand the response to the epidemic.

First trained as a veterinarian, Gao later earned a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Oxford and did postdocs there and at Harvard University, specialising in immunology and virology. His research specialises in viruses that have fragile lipid membranes called envelopes – a group that includes SARS-CoV-2 – and how they enter cells and also move between species.

Gao answered Science’s questions over several days via text, voicemails, and phone conversations.

Gao’s responses to some of the questions asked:
Q: What can other countries learn from the way China has approached COVID-19?
A: Social distancing is the essential strategy for the control of any infectious diseases, especially if they are respiratory infections. First, we used “non-pharmaceutical strategies,” because you don’t have any specific inhibitors or drugs and you don’t have any vaccines. Second, you have to make sure you isolate any cases. Third, close contacts should be in quarantine: We spend a lot of time trying to find all these close contacts, and to make sure they are quarantined and isolated. Fourth, suspend public gatherings. Fifth, restrict movement, which is why you have a lockdown, the cordon sanitaire in French.

Q: What mistakes are other countries making?
A: The big mistake in the US and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.

Q: What about other control measures? China has made aggressive use of thermometers at the entrances to stores, buildings, and public transportation stations, for instance.
A: Yes. Anywhere you go inside in China, there are thermometers. You have to try to take people’s temperatures as often as you can to make sure that whoever has a high fever stays out.

Q: People who tested positive in Wuhan but only had mild disease were sent into isolation in large facilities and were not allowed to have visits from family. Is this something other countries should consider?
A: Infected people must be isolated. That should happen everywhere. You can only control COVID-19 if you can remove the source of the infection. This is why we built module hospitals and transformed stadiums into hospitals.

Q: Spread in China has dwindled to a crawl, and the new confirmed cases are mainly people entering the country, correct?
A
: Yes. At the moment, we don’t have any local transmission, but the problem for China now is the imported cases. So many infected travelers are coming into China.

Q: But what will happen when China returns to normal? Do you think enough people have become infected so that herd immunity will keep the virus at bay?
A
: We definitely don’t have herd immunity yet. But we are waiting for more definitive results from antibody tests that can tell us how many people really have been infected.

Q: So, what is the strategy now? Buying time to find effective medicines?
A
: Yes – our scientists are working on both vaccines and drugs.

[link url="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-protect-against-coronavirus-big-mistake-top-chinese-scientist-says"]Full Science report[/link]

[link url="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf"]WHO report[/link]

MedicalBrief — our free weekly e-newsletter

We'd appreciate as much information as possible, however only an email address is required.