The coronavirus pandemic is on its way to affect 800,000 people worldwide at the time of writing. The United States, Italy, China and Spain are the hardest hit countries, and the curve is expected to rise even further to reach ‘peak’ of infections in the coming weeks.
Faced with the crisis, the management of governments around the world has not been the same. Most countries stood out for downplaying the health emergency and took the attitude of ‘waiting to see how things develop’. Others, on the other hand, decided to apply early prevention measures that have minimized the catastrophic effects of health and economic collapse that COVID-19 is causing in other not so far-sighted nations. And this fact is not an opinion that you write about, but rather the conclusions of an analysis by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety in Baltimore. Therefore, which are the countries that have acted more efficiently against the coronavirus and what have they done to minimize both deaths and infections? What can we learn from them?
As reported by the medical news agency Medical Xpress, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan are ‘uncomfortably’ close to China, the initial epicenter of the pandemic. Nonetheless, all three recognized the new coronavirus as a threat early on, and were determined and ‘aggressive’ in detecting suspected cases and tracking potential new infections , according to public health experts at the Johns Hopkins Center. As a consequence, each of these three countries managed to contain the infections, preventing COVID-19 from reaching epidemic proportions within their borders.
According to experts, the way they did it could serve as an example for other parts of the world. ” Actively detecting cases and isolating them so that the virus is not transmitted is the truly effective way to control an infectious disease outbreak, and this is what many Asian countries did,” according to Dr. Amesh Adalja, principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety in Baltimore.
“Instead, most of the world’s countries adopted a watch-and-wait strategy, unlike others like Vietnam,” adds Ravina Kullar, infectious disease researcher and epidemiologist with the Expert Stewardship in Newport Beach, California. “They were proactive, and I think that is key to preventing epidemics. By being ‘too’ cautious, they greatly benefited the country.”
Vietnam
With a population of more than 96 million, only 153 cases have been confirmed in Vietnam , according to the Johns Hopkins Center’s tracking of the global spread of the coronavirus. The Vietnamese government, moreover, soon began to organize press conferences at least once a day, where they provided honest and direct information on the status of the coronavirus.
South Korea
With 50 million and 9,300 confirmed COVID-19 cases, South Korea, for its part, started a system of a kind of phone booth to help people get tested for COVID-19 quickly and safely. While cases continue to rise, they have done so on a much more gradual incline in March after a sharp rise in February.
Taiwan
Just 130 kilometers from mainland China, Taiwan had all the ballots to become a hotbed of COVID-19 cases. There is a regular and constant flow of population between the island and China, but there have only been 252 confirmed cases among the island’s 23 million citizens.
As with Vietnam, Taiwan began screening passengers flying from Wuhan as early as Dec. 31 , according to the Asia Times. He also instituted border controls, quarantine orders and school closings, and established a command center for rapid communication between local governments and their citizens.
The experts’ conclusion is that both South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan learned lessons from the 2003 SARS-CoV epidemic and built their public health infrastructure to be able to respond immediately to future crises.
Although the United States, in the opinion of experts, lost the opportunity to avoid a COVID-19 epidemic and has become the new epicenter of the pandemic, the lessons learned from these three countries could be used to help control infections in the United States. months and years to come. ” Public health measures, such as rapid tests and tracking of possible cases should be on the list when states begin to lift their blockades,” the experts emphasize. An example of this tracking of possible cases is the implementation of codes QR with information of each citizen about their state of health and location, to know if they had a fever or not and what places in the city they had visited.
The experience in Taiwan and South Korea shows that democracies can respond effectively to an epidemic. For its part, China, with a totalitarian regime, has seen no new cases of local spread in almost a week.
Germany, the good European example thanks to nursing
Another example – this time, European – is Germany. Although the country has the fifth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, it has only recorded 239 deaths. Researcher Ravina Kullar cited the German health system as the reason why people survive the virus longer in this country: ” They have 13 nurses for every 1000 people , one of the highest rates of any of the other countries heavily affected by COVID-19. Nurses are the backbone of hospitals, especially in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) care. They have made sure to really focus on patient management and survival. “
