SAN FRANCISCO — US medical experts have expressed strong support for China's health system and healthcare workers under the enormous pressure of novel coronavirus epidemic.
What China is attempting to do in response to this problem, and to monitor people's movements and possible transmission is "unprecedented" and "remarkable," said Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at University of California, Berkeley, in a recent interview.
"Pretty much any city I know of, if all of a sudden there are thousands of people contracting severe pneumonia and requiring isolation, their resources will be greatly strained, anywhere in the world," he said.
Considering the "unprecedented" scale that overwhelms the system, Reingold said, "I don't know we'll do any better in a US city or in a European city, frankly. It's really a scale that obviously we prefer not to deal with."
Albert Wang, a doctor at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, said "the advance of biomedical science" in China was impressive and its ability to quickly identify the virus and sequence its genome was remarkable.
"Compared to SARS, the identification of the virus was much faster," he said, stressing that acting quickly was important for containing the epidemic.
In a recent daily briefing on the outbreak, Michael Ryan, executive director of the Health Emergencies Programme of the World Health Organization, told reporters that China's "getting success at putting out one fire" in Hubei province, which has been worst hit by the coronavirus, and "taking very directed measures" to monitor people returning from Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province and the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
"The strategic and tactical approach in China is the correct one," he said.
Wang, also the chair of the Bay Area chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association, said "the Chinese government is doing fairly well with rapid mobilization of medical resources to Wuhan and surrounding areas as well as attempt to quarantine a large part of the population."
"With such an overwhelming demand, I doubt anywhere on earth the local health care facilities can be sufficient. The quick construction of additional focused care facilities was quite amazing," he said.
