The epicenter of the pandemic, the Chinese city of Wuhan, took action in mid-January, just over a month after the first cases of a mysterious new coronavirus (later dubbed SARS-CoV-2) became known. On January 22, with 500 people affected in a city of 10 million people, Wuhan declared a quarantine . Two days later, classes at all levels of education were suspended. The Hubei region, of which Wuhan is the capital, had registered 5,000 affected by January 30. It was then that a colossal engineering work was launched: the construction of a hospital with a capacity for 1000 people in just 10 days.
Through social networks, many Wuhan residents have been telling about their day-to-day for months: packages of basic products for which they only go down to the street on rare occasions; drones to control that all citizens wear the mask; entry and exit records in the subway via QR codes throughout China, with color codes: green if there is no danger, orange for those who have visited areas without risk during the previous 14 days and red for those who must remain in quarantine. Leisure venues such as bars, discos, cinemas, gyms and sports centers are still closed; and, in workplaces, and even residences, visits are restricted. In addition, to access certain public places, such as parks or restaurants (and even some private places, such as urbanizations) the police take your temperature , identify you and report your situation.
Do these measures seem excessive? Regardless of our judgment, there is an indisputable fact: the number of infected people decreases and, in addition, those recovered from COVID-19 are increasing every day , as we can see in the following graph, obtained from Johns Hopkins University, which monitors in real time the number of cases, deaths and recoveries.
Should we learn from China?
In Europe, Italy, France and Spain are the countries that accumulate the most infections (12,462, 2,284 and 2,277, respectively). The declaration of pandemic that the WHO issued yesterday was also accompanied by some words that can be interpreted as a ‘reprimand’ to the countries that try to contain the new coronavirus. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “concerned, both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” That word, ‘inaction’, is what leads us to compare ourselves with countries like China, which already in 2002 suffered another outbreak of similar characteristics, SARS (with a mortality rate of 10%, although a lower propagation capacity ), and that allowed them to ‘train’ to mitigate an epidemic.
So should we learn from China? The answer is not clear . Interestingly, if we look at the global health security index (GHS Index), China is less prepared to face global health challenges than other European countries, such as France and England; or even Thailand, Russia, Australia and the United States. From a ranking of 195 countries, it is in position 51, below Spain (position 15); Mexico (28th place) Argentina and Chile (25th and 27th places). However, China is very close to countries such as Peru (49th) and Colombia (65th). The United States leads the ranking, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Thailand, South Korea, Sweden and Finland.
The GHS is a global index that analyzes the potential of the world’s countries in health security in six categories: prevention, detection, rapid response, health system, capacity to collect data and risk to the environment. However, as a measurement system, it has its shortcomings : it only analyzes the health information that each country has published on its official channels.
