On April 3, the Joint Working Group of Shandong Province came back to China after completing its tasks in UK. In an exclusive interview with the Global Times reporter on the 4th, experts from the working group stated that the working group carried out 5 knowledge exchange activities about COVID-19 for overseas Chinese and personnel from Chinese-funded institutions during the period in the UK, and sent prevention materials to some Chinese citizens in the UK. At the same time, the working group also shared the experience of prevention and control of China's epidemic with the British national health officials and local health personnel such as Scotland. "British officials are particularly interested in how China mobilizes medical resources, how the community can jointly prevent and control, and how to adopt centralized isolation measures," the experts told the reporter.
Shen Ning, an attending physician in the Department of Pulmonary Medicine of the Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, told the Global Times that the health status of overseas Chinese and students in the UK is generally good, but panic and anxiety are more prominent, and they are worried about the difficulty of purchasing drugs and epidemic prevention items. Zhang Ke, an expert in psychological and high-risk behavior intervention at the Shandong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the reporter that the UK ’s guidance on how to protect individual citizens is not comprehensive enough, so the expert team repeatedly explained to Chinese citizens in the UK how to separate indoor and outdoor environments. And advise them to stop using public transportation.
It is understood that the working group also conducted video exchanges with relevant medical experts, such as Lord Bethel, Deputy Secretary of the British Ministry of Health, Wen Xin, Deputy Chief Medical Officer of England, and Whiteman, Director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Scottish Government, to share China's experience in epidemic prevention and treatment. Zhang Ke told the Global Times reporter that the British side's health and medical resources are mainly concentrated in the British Ministry of Health. At present, the main strategy for anti-epidemic is to solve problems with medical treatment. Unlike it, one of China's strategies is to mobilize all forces including community doctors and grassroots organizations involved into prevention and control.
Zhang Ke said that the British side is very interested in China's community joint defense and joint control, and asked some questions about how to mobilize and arrange medical resources. "The UK is not doing epidemiological surveys at the moment, so it is not very clear about the infection chain," Zhang Ke said. Therefore, the British side is very impressed with China's epidemiological survey work.
In addition, according to the working group, the Scottish government officials said in the exchange that as the epidemic spreads, the local medical system will be under tremendous pressure, so they would like to know China's experience in the allocation of medical resources.
According to the working group, British health officials and experts also explained the treatment of mild patients to Chinese experts, and had a detailed understanding of the centralized isolation model. The expert group told the British counterparts that in China, as long as the diagnosed patients need to be hospitalized, it is conducive to monitoring changes in the patient's condition and prevention of the epidemic. Especially after the late medical resources are added, as long as the diagnosed patients are hospitalized, the suspected patients also need to be hospitalized for isolation and observation.
The World Health Organization reported that as of April 3, 33,722 cases had been diagnosed in the UK, with 4244 new cases on that day, 2921 cases of deaths, and 389 cases on the same day.
