03-04-2020, 01:30 AM
Quote:China took a whole bunch of steps when they realized they had to repurpose big chunks of their hospital systems to [respond to the outbreak]. The first thing is, they said testing is free, treatment is free. Right now, there are huge barriers [to testing and treatment] in the West. You can get tested, but then you might be negative and have to foot the bill. In China, they realized those were barriers to people seeking care, so, as a state, they took over the payments for people whose insurance plans didn’t cover them.Coronavirus in China: The most important lessons from China’s Covid-19 response - Vox
The other thing they did: Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals]. Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment]. And they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.
You look at the big, long lists of all the cases and identify those where you have clusterings in space and time and try to investigate what kind of clustering happened: Was it in a hospital, an old-age home, theaters, restaurants? We found it was predominantly in families. It’s not a big surprise; China had shut down a lot of the other ways people could gather. And family clusters are the closest, longest exposures [to the virus], and getting the virus is a function of whether someone’s got it, how long they’re exposed, and how much virus they are shedding. More of a surprise, and this is something we still don’t understand, is how little virus there was in the much broader community
That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying. This suggests the Chinese are really good at keeping people alive with this disease, and just because it’s 1 percent in the general population outside of Wuhan doesn’t mean it [will be the same in other countries].