“Not Wearing Mask Is Stupid”: Chinese Doctors On The Front Line Against Coronavirus

Mandatory mask for everyone, strict confinement and quarantine in designated centers for minor cases, suspects or in contact with the sick. It is the recipe recommended by Chinese doctors who have managed to bring the coronavirus under control in Wuhan City, the original focus of the pandemic, and who do not bite their tongues. Not wearing a mask in countries affected by the pandemic “is not a cultural difference; it’s stupid, ”says Dr. Wang Xinghuan, who runs the Leishenshan Hospital, one of two built in just ten days in Wuhan at the outbreak of the epidemic.

These days, Leishenshan, with 1,500 beds and which welcomed 2,011 patients during the worst of the epidemic in Wuhan, only cares for 15 patients. His days are numbered: it will cease to be operational next Wednesday. This Saturday, the National Health Commission has announced that the patients who still remain in it, and its twin, Huoshenshan, will be transferred to other hospitals to continue their treatment. Leishenshan will be dismantled at some point, although its officials clarify that “it will not be this year.”

Things have changed a lot since the time of its construction at full speed, when Chinese official propaganda made it a star example of the national response to the epidemic. The works could be followed live by streaming on the Internet, where millions of people saw them, and their inauguration on February 8 was carried out with great fanfare.

But after two and a half months, and with only 94 seriously ill patients out of the 50,000 infected that – according to official figures – has been counted since the beginning of the crisis, Wuhan said this week goodbye to the quarantine blockade that isolated her from the rest. in the world since January 23. The 42,000 health professionals who came from other provinces to attend initially overflowed hospitals have returned home. Leishenshang, whose precast modules accuse the haste with which it was built, is no longer necessary.

Most of the 32 wings dedicated to receiving patients have already been sealed; in the corridors there are only the drawings with messages of encouragement that the doctors and nurses who worked there traced with markers and have now returned to their centers. The ambulances that once brought hooting and speeding patients to their negative pressure rooms are standing still.

But those responsible say that, despite the improvement in the situation in Wuhan and the official end of the quarantine, you should not let your guard down. The city continues to detect asymptomatic cases, with 44 suspected cases under observation. Two people died Friday of Covid-19. “Surveillance is still essential,” said Wang in a press conference offered by the doctors responsible for the hospital with foreign media this Saturday.

The director of the center, who also heads the Zhongshan hospital – one of the spearheads in the fight against coronavirus during the epidemic in Wuhan – was blunt about the measures he considers essential to defeat the pathogen. The first, the use of masks among the entire population, “a very important measure for the health of everyone. Not wearing it is stupid. It is a fundamental way of protecting oneself and others. ” To such an extent, he stresses, that “if you do not wear a mask, you cannot control the infection.”

Quarantines for suspicious or minor cases in designated centers and away from the family nucleus, along with strict confinement, are also a basic measure. If these people remain in their homes “they will infect many members of the family unit. Quarantine at home does not work ”, according to the experience lived in Wuhan, emphasizes Wang. In the first weeks, and until the strict confinement of all the citizens was decreed and the suspicious cases and contacts of the infected in quarantine centers and hotels, infections spiked among members of family units. “If we do not cut the roots of the transmission, the infections will grow; If we do not isolate the infected, we will not contain the virus, ”he insists.

A third ingredient in the prescription for Covid-19 is an abundant use of tests to detect the coronavirus. “Many are needed to detect the sick and the asymptomatic, or those who have to be isolated outside the private home so that they do not infect others,” he recommends.

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