Is China losing control of the coronavirus outbreak? I Inside Story

Its China is

losing

control

of the corona virus

outbreak

, the number of cases at the epicenter is rising sharply, and the Communist Party leaders managing the response have been fired. A change of strategy is needed. This is an inside

story

. Hello and welcome to the program. I'm Nick Clark. China's president admits shortcomings in response to

coronavirus

outbreak

Xi Jingping vows to fix problems and gaps in health system Solutions cannot come too soon Nearly 65,000

coronavirus

cases have been recorded worldwide 99% of them In China, the epicenter of the outbreak, Hubei province reported a sharp increase in new cases, but the World Health Organization says this is because doctors are using a broader definition to diagnose those infected.

The head of the Communist Party is among four local leaders who will be fired. Tens of millions of Chinese are running out of food and patients 80 cities have been closed for a month leaving everyone stuck at home as Katrina now reports empty streets and an increasingly empty refrigerator there are plenty of vegetables but not much meat for the next meal of the Wong families during the coronavirus lockdown speaking via Corbeil's feature video call told us that his family was trying their best not to panic, well, we're going home with pre-sanitizing fluid all over the place. body when we go out we wear a mask, we don't know if we go out, we come back with a The virus stuck to our clothes, so in fact, every day it lives in Jing Minh, a city neighboring Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus outbreak for three weeks.

The family has been ordered to stay home. Movement is increasingly restricted. Once every three days, one family member is allowed. leave home to pick up food and produce an unlimited number of shoppers line up a meter apart waiting to enter It has been almost a month since Wang saw her daughters staying with relatives in southeastern China. I am relieved that my wife and daughters are not there who at this point we chat online every day are fine just worry about me the vast majority of confirmed cases of Crono virus more than 50 thousand are in Hubei province the Patients have been sharing videos on social media of life inside makeshift hospitals quarantined sent At least 1,700 medical staff are among those infected elsewhere in China People are taking no chances Wang Qishan hopes China's leaders Bay learn the lesson of the outbreak at first no one paid enough attention everyone saw it was under

control

until it was too late and looking forward to life under lockdown coming to an end Katrina, al-jazeera Beijing okay let's bring our guests to Hong Kong, we have dr.

John Nichols, clinical professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong, is also an expert on influenza viruses from Oxford, in the United Kingdom, we have a Dr. Peter Drobik, global health specialist and director of the Skull Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford and also Dr Sung-joo, reader in modern hi

story

at the University of Essex, among the investigations is China's health system , welcome everyone, dr. niccole, if I could start with you first of all before we get into the nitty-gritty of the issue at hand, let's spend a little time with you and assess where we are with this virus.

Are we really closer to understanding where? We are dealing with this virus and its impact globally and in China, what kind of threat is it? Well, that is a very long question that is difficult to answer, but certainly now that in Hong Kong we have had the samples of the virus that we can. start growing it in the laboratory and now we can infect normal human tissues in a culture system to try to react, see what part of the body it replicates, which will help us determine where it can spread. If we look to see within coronaviruses where this virus will live, we don't think it will be as serious as one like SARS or MERS, but the question is how much more serious it is than the other circulating corona viruses that were in the environment.

So hopefully the lab's point of view will have a better idea about where the real severity of this infection and this virus lies in terms of what's happening on the other side of the border and in China it's a very complex situation, but as you indicated, there are very similar situations. The similarities with SARS is that during the SARS outbreak in 2003, which we were unfortunately involved in, the number of healthcare workers that became infected is a repeat of what we saw in the SARS outbreak and that is a major concern. because we get sick in healthcare. workers who also hinder the manageability of the healthcare system.

Am I right in saying that this virus seems less lethal than the SARS virus but more infectious? That's right, you are absolutely right that if we look at the overall mortality and morbidity at this stage it is much less lethal than the sad coronavirus or MERS and that is one of the things we have tried to do here is to make the public more aware that this is not going to be so serious. in terms of mortality, that's creating a very high degree of anxiety about it, but it's certainly causing a lot of concern about the impact on how well the health care system was and a quick, very finite final question about this: Viruses don't . like the heat, that means this could be seasonal as the seasons change, that this virus will go away, well this is not the 64 million dollars, but one was the 64 billion dollar question before we looked at the Historical evidence is that the seasonal Sorry, coronaviruses are the mildest that have a seasonal influence, they sent a peak in the winter and decline in the summer, so the hope is that this virus will do the same in SARS.

We saw that the outbreaks stopped around May or The June dance could be due to the population being more aware and changes in social hygiene or in the weather, we seriously hope that the weather is an impediment to the vast, on the other hand it means that if this would mean that the virus could go down to the southern hemisphere it will get much colder many unknowns at the moment it is certainly very here at the moment dr. Sun, let's just look at the situation in China and how it has been dealt with there. In his opinion, has China done enough?

In my opinion, China has done enough. It depends how you look at it. There is something from the beginning. There really was something. A public health intervention and how the crisis is handled is largely political, so the approach was very authoritarian and the measures that were introduced were largely to ensure social stability, for example controlling the laboratory to prevent information like the Chinese communist did. It was said that all the rumors would be leaked and that's why a lot of work was carried out in China, Indonesia. The initial state was to hide the information and yes, on television, so when we see now that officials are being fired, it is this.

Is this just scapegoating by leaders covering up what is or could be an overburdened healthcare system? Okay, lean, yes, it's obvious that the Chinese healthcare system is weak, overburdened, inefficient, expensive and chaotic. The dismissal of the official. Yes, he is a scapegoat. It is normal practice for communists to be seen by the Authority in Ocala and held responsible for their weak and inefficient healthcare system, so it was the young people on the ground who were incapable of handling the crisis or their misdeeds that led to the problem, right, inconvenient Peter, it's easy to criticize, right? Of course, this is a new virus in the human population, so we're still learning about the dynamics of how it spreads and how easily it spreads, so there were so many unknowns and there are still so many that it's very difficult to predict. . and obviously, after a slow start there, the response in China has been quite extraordinary in terms of the efforts that have been made to isolate millions of people and build field hospitals and we still don't know if those things will work, but of course Of course, there has been a fairly aggressive response and internationally they have promised signs of cooperation and, although the number of cases outside of China continued to increase, those numbers are still small and the WHI, of course, said that the World Health Organization has done.

I have extolled the virtues of China's response, what do you think of that? Yes, again, they have taken really unprecedented steps in terms of trying to control this outbreak and I think right now what is really required is an unprecedented exchange of transparency of information and international cooperation, so we have seen China allow Let international experts from whu-oh and elsewhere come and provide support when needed. Sharing scientific information is incredibly important. You know, viruses do not respect borders and therefore anything that suppresses information sharing or secrecy. it really favors the virus, so what we need is cooperation.

Do you think that the actions of the WHO itself are satisfactory? Over the years there has been a lot of criticism about how the wao works and the time has come to reform it. systems to handle emergency situations like this. Do you think this response has rejected those criticisms? Yes, I think the response or involvement of the WTO has been appropriate and generally commendable in helping to share information and combat some of the mission formation epidemics that we have seen to promote cooperation and try to pool resources, which What we need to remember is that the WHO, as an agency, is really more of a coordinating agency and has very little power on its own to enact public health measures, but it does have power to work. with and influence countries on the ground to do so and I think they have been doing a good job dr. niccole we saw this big increase in reported cases in Hubei province on Thursday and that's because the criteria for reporting cases was changed, just tell us a little bit more about that and what that means and what it means in terms of how should we interpret the numbers that are coming out of China, yes, basically what is changing is that before the way they are trying to isolate the virus, there is no way that there are two normal ways of detecting if people have a large variety of aspects. for the virus itself, using something called an antigen protection kit, we're looking for opponents of a virus or you're looking for the vasogenic composition using the RNA, it's an RNA virus using something called PCR, so right now there's no rapid antigen test for detecting the chronotron, so they are forced to use PCR and that has some problems with the way the sample is taken and because also at this stage it is still not clear where in the tract device respiratory is being replicated and where it is being taken. the sample might cause a bit of a problem, so the way you can change it is to try to get the most severe cases and then move on to using chest x-rays, which will actually be the case if the patient is ungrounded.

Clinical signs of pneumonia can be presented and then easily managed, so in a way it's about triaging the most severe cases, who really needs treatment and also because this means that you know a lot more facilities have chest. -rays and you can get a quick change and I think it's a good way to get a good idea of ​​what we call the denominators because right now, when young people have unanswered questions about this virus, if we talk about what is called The Tip of the iceberg is what we're seeing in Hubail Wuhan: these are just severe clinical cases and there's a large proportion that may only have very mild symptoms, so this is a way of trying to classify, you know, to what degree.

The seriousness of this virus. I think it was emphasized that this increase in the number of cases is not due to the number of people who got sick, but rather the number of people classified with it, so in general I think it is very appropriate when you have problems with the Not enough children with diagnosis that they try to use a tool that allows for a better assessment of who really needs to be admitted and treated correctly, so they widen the net to some extent. The doctors feel exactly the right things that we have had. This series of announcements from the Chinese government today about improving the response to major diseases that we alluded to earlier about how it has exposed loopholes and how the Chinese government will close them and with this kind of disparity in the numbers that we have heard about talk this week Did you trust the Chinese government to do what was necessary?

Are you satisfied with the figures coming out of China? I was going to say something about Chinese statistics and from my experience working in archives and nuclear energy, Chinese devices you know what I do is disease prevention etc. and I would say that Chinese sticks are not reliable. I can tell you why, because some of them, quite often, are the people at the grassroots level, the ones whoThey are responsible for collecting the statistics, the data and it is you. or they don't have enough time to finish or they don't have the capacity, they just got called in, you know, in a special way, since, like such a major outbreak, there are such a large number and so many people are being recruited for the job they didn't have previous experience and therefore they and the data they collected were not reliable, in that case, in some cases, they simply did not have time, so you just write down anything and when these bastards go up to the next level, the experts or their higher ups have these pits to bury files in sticks, that data, but they have no means to do it, so what they do is they massage the feet and the data to make it look like it's more or less correct, yeah, then it goes to the next level, You know the professional authority and when they don't want to, you know it's efika to make them look bad, they want to do it. show that they're comfortable with the situations, so, you know, over-reporting success or not reporting, you know the type of failure or you know the downs and more practice, well, there's certainly been a change in their tone. of the transparency that we saw in January and now has given way to the state media not touching the negative and accentuating the positive dr. inconvenient, what do you think about this if prevention becomes a moral crusade?

Yeah, so you know, the connectivity to report the good stories, yeah, the success, the moving stories, right and doctor, what is your opinion on this area if it seems like we can't trust data, statistics are being manipulated and changed and in that case they change all the parameters of how we handle this, yes, absolutely, I mean, it is important that we have data as accurate as possible and suppressing any information if that is happening is obviously This will really hinder the response. Who may play a role in invalidating some of the statistics, so I don't know if those reports are true?

Obviously, that's very difficult, right? And in your opinion, what has been this combined effort of the whu-oh and I hope that when time tells again, it is difficult to understand the trends because we have some questions about the validity of the data, as has been pointed out, but also because this reclassification of cases in recent days has caused an increase in the number of reported cases, so it is difficult to understand if we are close to a leveling of cases or a turning point or not, it seems that that is not the case still, at least within the epicenter. of the epidemic and Hubei province dr.

Nichols Adele, if you want to come back to that but also want to ask you about it, move on to the prospects of a vaccine and where we are with that, okay, so I just want to follow up, you know, I think we're looking. More so in cases that are happening outside of mainland China, we actually know that you have the people that have the resources. I think it's probably going to be a better indicator of the actual severity of the disease and the natural history of this viral outbreak rather than the overworks and overloaded system across mainland China, which is why I think we shouldn't separate, you know, the cases. of adults around the world, but I just said, but look, those are naturally regional, so that can give us a better idea of ​​the situation. what is the true nature of this disease and the vaccine.

I think I really believe those who think there may be a vaccine in about six months. I've been watching too much Hollywood because actually to get a vaccine you have to make sure it works. is that it has no side effects and the animal disease model that we are questioning, which shows that it is effective, the route of administration, can be expanded and this and the side effects, so I think the last thing we want is brushing . a vaccine in a population to have side effects and then you get as negative a reaction as we saw in the Philippines with the outbreak of things like measles that happened after the scare about one of the vaccines, so this current outbreak really It won't be.

I can't have any hope for a vaccine and the problem is also in the past. I think there has been limited success of the coronavirus vaccine. With influenza, there is a long history of getting reliable vaccines, but with the corona virus I think we are dealing with a totally new stage. and the dr. Dre Beckham some school of thought that for every case that is reported there are seven or eight more out there is that his view of how things work is hard to know for sure again because we are getting incomplete information from China, I think, as Dr.

Nichols suggested that outside of China, particularly in countries with stronger health systems, the numbers are likely to be much more accurate. I think it's probably pretty safe to assume that the total number of cases is higher than what has been reported so far, particularly given the number of mild cases that may go unrecorded, either seven or eight times or more or less than you know, there are mathematical models, but I couldn't say it correctly and the doctors and Julia in China, what are they hearing about the general response to how the government has handled this is their satisfaction is how they will come out at the end of all this well, you mean Those responsible for the people, the government's response, the response of the people of the population in general, how do you consider how the government has responded to this?

Well, people have been very divided and some, you know, they're funny, there's a different reaction today and others, you can be on the same page with the government, they say this is a political thing and they see this, as you know, like the rise of China and They want you to know that worry is largely the kind of being that you know these governments like about diseases and there are a lot of people who also don't trust either the political system or the health system and there is a lot of panic. Given the panic and fear and yes, obviously, distrust, which makes prevention and control of the virus even more difficult, people don't trust the system, they don't trust governments, they are no less likely to do what they have told you. get it right very, very quickly, a dr.

Nichols and is going to jump in there, these outbreaks appear quite frequently in China, coronavirus, SARS in 2003, bird flu, etc., in about 30 seconds, you can describe why it is because this is where you get a high population density and wild animals and basically. You will also see that if we also have a rural economy very close to an economy that allows the mixing of viruses from one host to another. I think it's very likely that from the bat to an intermediate host to humans are very close. but having said that, although Xi Jinping might close wildlife markets in China, Vietnam and Indonesia, they will still be these small village-type markets where sanitation and infection control are not as high and that's what we still have bird flu. not in major cities but in rural areas, so China can stand out, but I think in other Asian countries it can still be a problem.

Well, we'll see how things develop, but let's run. out of time and dr. John Nichols Dr. Sims you and dr. Peter Drederick thank you very much for joining us here on the show and thank you also for watching. You can rewatch this show anytime by visiting our website aljazeera.com and for more discussions simply visit our Facebook page which is at facebook.com. bar AJ's inside story and you can also join the conversation on Twitter. Our handle is AJ's inside story for me. Nick Clark team here, let's go back.