Search

The rate of infectious disease outbreaks has been accelerating over the past two decades, from the SARS epidemic in 2003 to COVID-19 in 2020. Termed by some as the twenty-first century's first pandemic, SARS originated in China and alerted the country to the importance of public health and epidemic response. After SARS, China improved its health infrastructure and reformed its political and legal health governance system. The emergence of COVID-19 from Wuhan in late 2019 put those reforms to the test. This paper analyses China's public health and epidemic response policies from a historical perspective, tracing the evolution of Chinese public health policies after the SARS outbreak in 2003. This paper assesses China's response to COVID-19 and how post-SARS policy reforms, particularly in epidemic response, played out on the ground in Wuhan. What policies worked well? What were the challenges faced? Based on the policy analysis, this paper presents recommendations for how China can improve its epidemic response through strengthened infectious disease surveillance, more transparent political coordination, and expanded public health infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the moment, the shortcomings in the system of responding to crises in the health sector lie in the imperfection of the response order and management mechanisms. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the legal regulation and reflection of public health emergencies in China, as exemplified by the case of 2019 coronavirus. The paper discusses the legal framework for the regulation of emergency situations in public health in China for the period from the end of 2019. The importance of preventing and controlling the epidemic is substantiated, and shortcomings in the work to combat the epidemic are analysed. Particular attention is paid to issues of informing the public and the rule of law in emergency situations in public health. The provisions of the legislation of the People's Republic of China in public health emergencies were also examined. The paper is of practical importance not only for China, but for the entire world in the prevention and control of coronavirus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a varying coefficient Susceptible-Infected-Removal (vSIR) model that allows changing infection and removal rates for the latest corona virus (COVID-19) outbreak in China. The vSIR model together with proposed estimation procedures allow one to track the reproductivity of the COVID-19 through time and to assess the effectiveness of the control measures implemented since Jan 23 2020 when the city of Wuhan was lockdown followed by an extremely high level of self-isolation in the population. Our study finds that the reproductivity of COVID-19 had been significantly slowed down in the three weeks from January 27th to February 17th with 96.3% and 95.1% reductions in the effective reproduction numbers R among the 30 provinces and 15 Hubei cities, respectively. Predictions to the ending times and the total numbers of infected are made under three scenarios of the removal rates. The paper provides a timely model and associated estimation and prediction methods which may be applied in other countries to track, assess and predict the epidemic of the COVID-19 or other infectious diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]