China was the country where Covid-19 originated, and therefore the country that had the least amount of time to prepare for this pandemic, ...
China was the country where Covid-19 originated, and therefore the country that had the least amount of time to prepare for this pandemic, especially given its late initial response.
How then did China overcome these significant handicaps and manage to reduce new domestic cases to nearly zero over the span of two months? What successful steps did China take that other, more developed countries did not? How do we contextualise these lessons given the Indian context, with different levels of state capacity?
Based on analysis we come up with three recommendations:
- First, develop and universalise an online risk assessment platform.
- Second, popularise free testing, and use community healthcare workers to conduct testing in homes.
- And third, modify our lockdown to better reflect our lower state capacity and imperfect police system as we cannot fully mimic China given our different context.
Covid-19 cases in China
Lesson 1: Leveraging technology
Hangzhou, the headquarters of tech giant Alibaba, was the first Chinese city to adopt QR codes for medical service. The local city government asked citizens to register themselves with their names, telephone number and social security card on an online system that rated infection risks as red, yellow or green based on a self-reported survey about recent travel history, contact with infected people/people...
