Mask, hand sanitizer and temperature are checked three times a day.
It is the average day for millions of school children in China, as Kovid-19 was first identified in the country, but has declared victory over the coronavirus.
More than 240 million students from kindergarten to university returned to class in September due to strict supervision measures.
“For students, they all understand that we use them to keep them safe at school, so they all follow it,” said Lee Helong, an English teacher at an elementary school in Beijing.
Sanctions in China extend across Europe and the U.S. The same places are similar in, but the wider level of public observance seems to make a difference.
Woven into the fabric of everyday life is a system of health codes that assign color-coded designations based on a person’s health status. Masks, temperature checks and mass testing are ubiquitous.
It has been criticized by the Chinese government for its lack of openness and for reducing the severity of the outbreak. The country has also been accused of misleading and silencing whistleblowers in the early stages of the outbreak.
President Donald Trump has been one of the most vocal critics, accusing Beijing of an early failure that enabled the virus to spread more quickly.
But 10 months after the outbreak of the virus, life is approaching the pre-epidemic norm in China, to an extent not seen in other countries.
“They have done a wonderful job of controlling the virus,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the University of Washington and a former official with the International Health Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But such success is only possible through restrictions on individual freedom, he said. And in other democracies it will not be tolerated.
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In a tight lockdown in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the virus first developed in January, with authorities taking strict measures to prevent people from entering or leaving.
David Harper, a senior fellow at the Global Health Program at the London-based think tank Chatum House, said the reports indicated a very strong adherence to the necessary measures.
“The existing system in China allows these central political directives to be implemented at the local level in a way that does not exist in many other countries of the world.”
China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has not reported a single Kovid-19 death since April 26, according to the country’s National Health Commission – the only official source in China for coronavirus infection rates. NBC News could not independently verify the reported numbers.
It reported 86,115 confirmed cases [AS OF NOV.4] And 4,634 deaths since the epidemic began. In contrast, only the U.S. More than 9 million cases and more than 230,000 deaths have been reported in, according to NBC News. Worldwide, the virus has killed more than 1.2 million people, with more than 48 million confirmed cases.
“China is taking everyone by surprise,” Mokdad said.
Recalling the 2002 SARS epidemic, which killed about 800 people and caused economic damage, earlier this year an outbreak made it possible for the Chinese to wear masks and social distance as soon as possible.
Fearing SARS, the country has reformed its public health system in a new way, says Ph.D. Kifang Ba said. Candidate of Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, who conducted the Covid-19 research in coordination with researchers at the Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Nevertheless, the CDC still faces many challenges, its success in bringing the case down amid the global epidemic shows that the public health system has come a long way since the stork.”
Early in the Kovid-19 outbreak, he said, the early and severe lockdown in Wuhan, activating people’s health reactions, played a key role in buying up precious time to other parts of China, preventing an increase in cases.
But most importantly, Mokadade said, the government’s response was one that included clear and consistent messages.
“There was a national order and everyone obeyed it,” he said.
Europe and the U.S. Faced with a large increase in new cases, China is keen to demonstrate its success in incorporating the virus.
Beijing’s world-famous auto show, which was postponed in April, opened its doors in September, becoming the first major auto show to do so since the epidemic. It was creamed with people, in which almost everyone wears a mask.
In Wuhan, the sports arena, which was used as a temporary hospital at the height of the epidemic, hosted a basketball game last month in front of 7,500 fans.
In the country’s biggest test, in the first week of October, more than 10,000 million Chinese traveled across the country to celebrate the Middle Ages, a traditional gathering for families and a national holiday celebrating the founding of Communist China.
As the holiday weekend wrapped up, the state-run newspaper Global Times reported increasingly crowded tourist destinations and said people were sharing posts about getting stuck in traffic jams again – calling the crowds “happy” that other countries want, but “Can’t be right now” “
But China is far from far from the woods, and the holiday trip was a big test for the country.
While domestic travel in the first week of October does not appear to have led to any new cases, a cluster of cases was reported in Qingdao, in the eastern province of Shandong, in which about 11 million residents were asked for testing. Prior to the Qingdao cases, China had not reported any infections locally since August 15.
In late October, after testing 7. million million people, authorities locked up the western city of Kashgar, then found a new cluster of cases.
China is also providing tight security against the virus coming from abroad.
On Thursday (Nov. 5), it banned non-Chinese travelers from Britain, France, Belgium, the Philippines and India, imposing some of the strictest entry curbs in any country.
“If they don’t maintain good behavior and start leaving their guard, they will see a growth again.”
