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Test the entire population
On May 12, the Wuhan Department of Health, Hubei Province, China asked all city counties to schedule community testing in the next 10 days. These tests will be conducted for both residents and migrants, especially in densely populated areas.
This can be viewed as the city’s unprecedented move of over 11 million people after discovering 6 new Covid-19 cases over the weekend after more than a month with no new cases reported in any community. All new infections are residents of the Sanmin neighborhood. An 89-year-old man has had symptoms of infection since March, but he was confirmed to have Covid-19 on 9/5 thanks to the test results. He is also the first Covid-19 patient in Wuhan since the city confirmed his latest new case on April 3. By tracing contacts, local health authorities have identified a number of asymptomatic cases. As of May 12, Wuhan has almost 600 asymptomatic cases “under medical supervision.”
“Wuhan so far has not been able to prevent cross contamination within the community. This presents the challenge of preventing asymptomatic Covid-19 people from passing the disease on to others. ” People’s diary China’s comment on 5/5.
Hard to do
Wuhan still faces the risk of infection in the community from asymptomatic cases. (Illustrations: EPA)
Extensive testing is considered necessary to prevent the spread of disease in the community, preventing new infections, especially in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases.
However, Narrow times Experts cite that large-scale testing is not a solution for Wuhan due to its high cost and lack of testing capacity.
Wu Zunyou, a leading scientist at the China Center for Disease Control, also said that universal tests are “unnecessary” and that large-scale tests should only be used in large groups: a group of people at high risk of infection.
Another expert, Gregory Gray, professor of medicine at Duke University (USA), evaluates asymptomatic patients as “a big problem” in the fight against Covid-19.
“Large-scale testing will help identify potential clusters of infection, but they must be done repeatedly to make it very expensive and difficult. “To prevent the spread of the disease, I discovered that there is no simpler and less expensive solution than the vaccination program, and this vaccination may need to be repeated after several years to maintain immunity,” Gray said. .
In addition to the cost problem, another problem Wuhan faces when conducting universal population testing is testing ability. According to official statistics, in late April, Wuhan conducted more than 1 million nucleic acid tests to identify people with Covid-19. However, with 53 laboratories and 211 testing facilities, Wuhan can only perform 46,000 tests per day, far lower than the target of approximately 1 million tests per day to assess the entire population in 10. Next day.
“After all, the crucial problem in China or in many parts of the world when cities are opened remains the best way to treat asymptomatic cases at the same time. restart the economy “, Narrow times identify.
Minh Phương
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