China’s efforts boost int’l co-op against pandemic

From Our
Correspondent

BEIJING: Across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing significant loss of life, disrupting livelihoods, and threatening the development and prosperity of the world.
As solidarity and cooperation are the most powerful weapons to fight the pandemic, China has been boosting international cooperation in an open, transparent and responsible manner since the onset of the unprecedented health crisis. By upholding the vision of building a community with a shared future for humanity, China has been providing updates on COVID-19 in a timely manner, unreservedly sharing its experiences in epidemic response and medical treatment with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international community, strengthening cooperation on scientific research, and providing assistance to all parties to the best of its ability.
In the face of a ballooning epidemic, the Communist Party of China Central Committee on Jan. 22 ordered Hubei province, the center of the outbreak at the time, to impose comprehensive and strict control over the outbound population flow, an unprecedented but effective move in modern Chinese history. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the serious lockdown measures not only protected the Chinese people, but also prevented the spread of the virus to other countries.
“China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” said a report released in late February by the WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19, consisting of 25 experts from eight countries and the WHO itself.
“Because of this strategy, if it weren’t for China’s efforts, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher,” he said at a WHO Executive Board meeting in Geneva.
After a nine-day field trip in Beijing and other Chinese provinces, the China-WHO expert team concluded that China’s unprecedented responses to the COVID-19 outbreak have yielded notable results in blocking human-to-human transmissions of the virus, preventing or at least delaying hundreds of thousands of cases.
The Chinese people stand on the frontline of defense in the fight against the pandemic, and have made huge contributions and sacrifices in order to safeguard the health and safety of people around the world, which deserves the respect of all countries worldwide, said Ivica Dacic, president of the Socialist Party of Serbia. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his address to the Extraordinary G20 Leaders’ Summit in March, proposed that a Group of 20 (G20) health ministers’ meeting be convened as soon as possible to improve information-sharing, strengthen cooperation on drugs, vaccines and epidemic control, and cut off cross-border infections.