Experts offer advice to expats in Shanghai about the pandemic-天天热闻

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At the lecture for preventing and controlling COVID-19 held on 6th January by the Shanghai People"s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and the Shanghai Heath Center of Public Welfare, Dr. Zhang Wenhong and his colleague Dr. Ai Jingwen answered questions about the epidemic situation raised by foreigners.

It was an open and heartwarming communication, with occasional laughter and applause from foreign friends. Before the lecture, the attendees had visited the Shanghai Heath Center of Public Welfare, which aims to use new technologies to build a new platform for health poverty alleviation and international communication and cooperation.

Currently in China, medical institutions at all levels are making all-out efforts to treat patients with severe symptoms. Due to the rapid spread of Omicron, along with the aging population in Shanghai, the infection rate of the elderly is still relatively high, and the number of seriously ill patients is increasing. 

The city is encountering the peak of critical cases, but the capacity for diagnosis and treatment at the community medical institutions and their medicine reserves are gradually improving. It is believed that the key to getting out of the epidemic lies in community doctors, the grass-root level of hierarchical treatment and adequate stocking of drugs.

‘Disease will be there forever, but life will go on,’ said Zhang Wenhong, head of the department of infectious diseases at Huashan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University.

The experts called for less vulnerable groups, those with no underlying diseases and only mild symptoms of fever, sore muscles and cough and no obvious shortness of breath, to choose district-level hospitals and community medical institutions for treatment. Obviously, the medical resources have been overwhelmed, and Shanghai is mobilizing all levels of medical institutions from primary care clinics to tertiary hospitals to save critically ill patients.

‘It"s essential to treat patients within the most critical golden 72 hours,’ Zhang noted. Neighborhood medical institutions are thus increasing the number of fever clinics, enhancing the training of medical personnel, providing oxygen therapy and antiviral drugs, and formulating standardized treatment manuals.

They"re also ensuring critically ill patients can be referred to higher-level hospitals through the triage protocol as soon as possible. Secondary and tertiary hospitals are optimizing the patient admission process and have made more ward beds available to make sure most critical patients are admitted within 24 hours.

District-level authorities are organizing medical treatments and resources to reach nursing facilities and homes for the elderly. City-level experts are also working with the grassroots facilities in different regions to strengthen diagnosis, consultation and training.

‘Through this meeting with Dr Zhang, we gained more confidence in Shanghai surviving this wave of the epidemic,’ said one of the attendees.