Molson Hart

Reminds room of genesis: "decision by the president of China in the meeting with @DrTedros, with a joint feeling that China had done a huge amount of work and it could inform both the global response and China’s own response to have an independent mission come in and do a review"

Team was made up of 25 people, 13 internationals and 12 Chinese, headed by Aylward. “"e saw facilities, we saw contact tracing, we saw markets in some places, we saw railway stations, airports. Really it was quite an exhaustive and exhausting schedule.”

What has China done to fight #COVID19? "They have taken very standard and what some people think of as old-fashioned public health tools and applied these with a rigour and innovation of approach on a scale that we have never seen in history”, says Aylward.

Aylward arguing that China basically applied case finding, contact tracing, social distancing etc. at unprecedented scale and that while people were skeptical that could work for respiratory virus like #SARSCoV2, it had a huge positive impact.

Says people think of lockdown of Wuhan, but actually China used the same approach to different degrees in places depending on whether there were no cases of #COVID19, sporadic cases, clusters or community transmission. "fundamentals were always the same”, but tailored to locale.

Aylward so far reiterating what he said yesterday at presser in China. Sounding extremely positive about Chinese actions: “China changed the course of this outbreak." “They mobilised a phenomenal collective action.” Prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of #COVID19, he says.

Am I the only one missing some kind of contextualising of Chinese actions in terms of political system, human rights, etc. ? Not all the lessons here can be applied elsewhere to combat #COVID19. And not all should be. Needs to be part of discussion surely.

Aylward says one big take-away for him: "The rest of the world is not ready” for #COVID19. Another: "You have to prepare your population. You have to bring your population along with you.”