A citywide lockdown was announced on January 23 two days before the Chinese New Year.

There was limited health care infrastructure and low public awareness initially of what was a new virus with little knowledge about its impact and means of transmission.

China took an all-of-government, all-of-society approach to identifying and controlling the source of the infection using testing, epidemic survey, isolation and social distancing from early on in an all-out effort to stop the spread of the disease.

It also reduced the risk of long-range transmission by closing transport links including highways, air and rail travel.

Resource allocation was also stepped up with hospital bed numbers increasing by 150,000 during the month of February. Each city in Hubei was paired with a province in China to provide medical support resulting in the deployment of over 40,000 health personnel.

Prof. Yang said special attention should be given to vulnerable populations in hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and schools.

One key overall lesson from the experience to date was “improving the awareness and ability of the public and the community in disaster prevention and mitigation, and risk communication.”

Prof. Yang concluded that international collaboration is extremely important at this moment. “We need to strengthen the collective efforts in information sharing, emergency logistics, transmission control and R&D of medicine and vaccine,” she said.

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Korea, Rep of