Shanghai experts advise Laos on lockdown

Early lockdown had a significant effect on halting the spread of coronavirus in China, a local medical expert said during an online conference held by the Chinese embassy in Laos, Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office and Shanghai Health Commission with medical experts from Shanghai and Laos.

Sun Xiaodong, deputy director of the Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Shanghai and elsewhere in China had benefited from the lockdown measures in Wuhan imposed by the Chinese government on January 23.

"The reported cases in Shanghai peaked around the end of January and early February. We reported 27 cases on January 30 and 25 cases on February 5. After that, we have seen a decline of newly confirmed cases," said Sun.

Sun said the major purpose of lockdown is to control the flow of people. So if there are some other measures that have the same effect, an area can adopt these measures rather than lockdown. Since the Lao experts said lockdown would have a serious impact on the economy and people’s daily lives, Sun thought governments should weigh the pros and cons of lockdown measures to decide whether they should be taken.

Regarding the limited capacity in Laos to carry out nucleic acid tests, Sun said that prior to Shanghai’s requirement for all inbound passengers to be tested, such tests were only given to those with symptoms of coronavirus disease in the city.

"We haven't applied large scale nucleic acid testing for a large population, particularly at an early stage of the epidemic, because our production capacity of the nucleic acid test kits is limited and we were not that sure about the sensitivity and specificity of the test kits."

Now production in China is sufficient for cities facing issues like the resumption of work as well as reopening of markets and schools. There’s also a pressing need for some governments in China to screen patients without symptoms. "Only by meeting all these conditions will we consider the screening with nucleic acid to the large population," Sun said.

Xu Jinfu, director of the respiratory and critical care department at Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, talked about the role of fever clinics in screening and identifying suspected cases. He told the Lao experts that they had analyzed 53,000 people who visited fever clinics in Shanghai and some of them didn't have the disease but believed they were infected.

They only found 1,400 suspected cases among the 53,000 people and 188 people tested positive. "Although it's a large-scale screening, the proportion of confirmed cases is relatively small. So strict screening is very effective in epidemic prevention."