Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bouey, Jennifer

Titel

Strengthening China's Public Health Response System: From SARS to COVID-19

Ist Teil von

• American journal of public health (1971), 2020-07, Vol.110 (7), p.939-940

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Public Health Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Today, the world is experiencing a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus. COVID-19 is the third disease from a coronavirus to cause a global outbreak, after severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and the second that emerged from China. During the 17 years between the SARS and the COVID-19 outbreaks, China has quadrupled its share of the world economy, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and established a national health insurance system covering 95% of its 1.4 billion people. Will China's public heath response to a coronavirus epidemic be different this time?The index case of the SARS outbreak occurred in GuangdongProvince on November 16, 2002. At the time, China lacked a national center for disease control that would have been responsible for maintaining a robust surveillance system for detecting emerging diseases. With no information from the government or the media, the Chinese public was not made aware of the outbreak until cell phone messages about a "deadly flu" started to circulate in early February 2003 in Guangzhou.1 By mid-March 2003, SARS clusters started to appear in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada. On March 27, 2003, a World Health Organization (WHO) team went to China and concluded that China's report of more than 300 atypical pneumonia cases from February were SARS cases.2 SARS ended up infecting more than 8000 people globally and led to 774 deaths.Between April and May 2003, more than 1000 officials-including China's minister of health and the mayor of Beijing- were fired or penalized for their slow response to SARS.1 The government then quarantined tens of thousands of people and locked down villages and city blocks. A new hospital in Beijing was built within 20 days to accommodate and quarantine SARS patients. The epidemic began to subside in late May, and, by June 27, the WHO announced that China was "SARS free."