Experts urge proactive measures to fight virus

Public health experts from China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the United States discussed experiences and lessons learned from the front-line responses to COVID-19 on Friday.

The panelists at the webinar convened by The John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute called for close collaboration globally to fight the pandemic.

"If we take this opportunity to cooperate and coordinate rather than to blame, shift and close ourselves off to cooperation (on COVID-19), we have the chance to come out stronger. We have the chance to become a stronger world through international cooperation," said John R. Allen, president of the Brookings Institute.

"We need to launch a global effort to find new drugs, antibodies and vaccines that are (not just) optimal for this virus, but also for this lineage of beta-coronavirus because the next pandemic may not be exactly from this coronavirus," said David Ho, world-renowned HIV/AIDS researcher and director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

"China has just gone through a very dark moment. However with it (the virus) still spreading throughout the world, I think we should work together to fight the disease, and I hope that … our experience as a first wave can be shared by other countries," said Zhang Wenhong, the director of Huashan Hospital's department of infectious disease and of the Shanghai panel overseeing the treatment of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, experts from China, South Korea, Japan and Singapore shared what has worked to combat the pandemic in their countries.

Zhang said the key to stopping the spread of the disease is early control in local transmission. He said the Shanghai CDC had been able to trace every patient and suspected cases.

The timely diagnoses and quarantine measures in Shanghai were effective to stop the circulation of COVID-19 in the city, Zhang said.

"This activity did not cause an overall impact on normal citizens' lives because we quarantined every suspected case we found and none of them spread the disease further in our community," he said. As a result, Shanghai had enough medical resources to treat the several hundred cases and the mortality rate in Shanghai was only 1 percent.

Soonman Kwon, a professor and former dean at the School of Public Health at Seoul National University, said at the beginning of the outbreak there were discussions on whether testing on a massive scale was needed.

"It turns out that mass-scale testing is quite an effective mechanism to find the cases, isolate them, and treat infected people," said Kwon.

Kenji Shibuya, a professor and director at the University Institute for Population Health at King's College London, said: "The trust of patients, health care professionals, and society as a whole in government is of paramount importance for meeting a health care crisis."

Vernon Lee, the director for Communicable Diseases at the Singapore Ministry of Health, said that instead of reacting to current information about COVID-19, Singapore worked with modelers to try and project what could happen over the next couple of weeks if nothing was done, so as a result a lot of Singapore's actions were anticipatory.

The experts suggested a proactive response for countries suffering from COVID-19 outbreaks.

Yi Zong in Washington contributed to the story.