A Chinese general once said to beat your enemy you have to know them at least as well as yourself. The world has been thrashing about with incomplete information regarding the spread of Covid-19 in China. Michael Zennie and Amy Gunia are pondering whether the increase in China cases is a positive step or not. We found their February 13, 2020 post on TIME website intriguing and decided to share.
Good Reasons Why the Increase in China Cases Is a Positive Step
Approximately five million people left Wuhan when the Covid-19 news broke. Officials told Zennie and Gunia that a high percent were probably migrant workers who returned to their Hubei villages before the lockdown.
The medical facilities in rural areas would not be as good as a Wuhan hospital. The returning workers were therefore unlikely to receive the same level of medical testing and treatment. They would probably not have taken the standard nucleic acid tests. And therefore if they had the Covid-19 virus the Chinese health authorities would not have known. We have no idea how many there are, and how infectious they have become. But at least we are taking a step in the right direction now.
China Can Identify and Isolate Clinically Identified Cases
China does have sufficient standard nucleic acid tests in stock to test everybody. That’s fair, who could have expected the speed with which the Covid-19 outbreak traveled? The increase in China cases is a positive step, because officials will now have a handle on more of the cases. They will therefore be able to trace the direction in which the virus is spreading more accurately.
They will also be able to gauge the effectiveness of their countermeasures to a greater extent, and identify best practice quarantines. The entire world will gain from this, as individual countries develop their own Covid-19 plans. So yes, this is a step in the right direction although we wish none of this happened.
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Preview Image: A Rural Village in China
