IS CHINA FINALLY WINNING ITS BATTLE AGAINST THE CORONA VIRUS?

Empty streets in Wuhan after the Chinese government lockdown orders - credits: Stringer for NPR

For the very first time since the inception of the epidemic in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, China is witnessing an immense decline in the rate of coronavirus cases as China’s health commission has not reported any new cases on Thursday due to the implementation of strict methods of virus prevention across the country.

Meanwhile, The National Health Commission announced that 8 deaths and 34 novel cases have been estimated in the last 24 hours in Hubei, a Chinese province. Such novel cases, however, are Chinese citizens who arrived from abroad to their homeland China.

"Today, we have seen the dawn after so many days of hard effort," said Jiao Yahui, a senior inspector at the National Health Commission, the Associated Press reported. Chinese hospitals that were completely occupied with coronavirus patients a few weeks ago are now much less packed and the rates of new cases has dramatically decreased.

Since the outbreak that originated in Wuhan, the total number of cases has reached 81,155 cases and 3,249 deaths countrywide as of March 19. However, the World Health Organization congratulated China last month on a “unique and unprecedented public health response [that] reversed the escalating cases”. China’s aggressive lock-down orders have been successful so far and other countries are following China’s effective methods to contain the rapidly escalating disease across the globe.

The Chinese government have exerted a lot of efforts to prevent new waves of infections within mainland and bring the crisis under control. The Authorities imposed travel restrictions, prevention measures as well as various methods of sanctions to force the citizens to abide by such measures. The Chinese citizens have been obligatorily quarantined at their houses, large social gatherings have been prohibited, shops have temporarily closed down and schools have gone virtual in order to hinder the rapid escalation of the virus.

On March 9 Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese epidemiologist recommended to other countries China’s strict measures in containing the outbreak of corona virus. "I think many countries should take measures [based on] the intervention mechanism invented in China. Upstream control is an ancient way but effective," Zhong, said, in a translation for the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. He added that China followed 4 main strategies that helped them overcome such crisis saying: "The core points are the 'four earlys,': early prevention, early detection, early diagnosis, and early quarantine."

The coronavirus has driven several countries around the globe to execute total lock-downs. The World Health Organization said that more than 101,000 people worldwide have contracted the coronavirus and declared the coronavirus as a pandemic on March 11. But now more than 220,000, cases including China has been confirmed and death toll has surpassed 9000 according to the map and dashboard from Johns Hopkins University. Italy, for instance, has reached a new peak of 3405 deaths, which surpassed China’s death toll of 3249 deaths as of March 19. In addition, the Irish health department announced on Thursday that the total number of confirmed cases of infection in Ireland leaped from 366 to 557 in just one day which is the highest daily increase yet.