Coronavirus: from vaccines to getting back to work, China turns to science for answers to the big questions
- Beijing issues report calling for scientists to prioritise development of drugs and treatments to help critically ill patients
- Science ministry says it has also commissioned research to help businesses resume operations and to prevent new infections being imported into the country
In a report released this week, the Ministry of Science and Technology said it was urging the country’s scientists to prioritise the development of drugs and treatments to help critically ill patients.
It said it had also commissioned new research – using computer simulations and big data – to better understand how the virus that caused Covid-19 spread, how to get the country back to work, and how to minimise the risk of importing new infections.
Speaking to scientists from the military and academia in Beijing on March 2, Xi urged them to redouble their efforts to create vaccines and other treatments to help fight Covid-19.
Xi said that science and technology were the most powerful weapons in humanity’s battle against disease, and that scientific findings in the field of biosafety were of strategic importance to the nation.
“We should build and enhance a new type of state-sponsored system in tackling critical and core technologies,” he said.
While Xi did not elaborate on his vision, the ministry report said that universities, science research institutes and businesses were central to achieving it.
Since the coronavirus outbreak took off in January, Beijing has assembled a task force comprising a dozen government agencies to spearhead at least 47 scientific and technological research projects related to tackling it.
These have focused on everything from vaccine development to testing kits, virology to epidemiology, and developing animal-based models to help understand how the disease affects humans.
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The ministry said it would differentiate between the development of vaccines for emergency use from those for the general population, while observing international safety standards.
Scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine for the pathogen that has killed more than 8,000 people and infected close to 200,000 globally.
The ministry report said that Chinese scientists had made some inroads in deploying artificial intelligence and big data analysis in forecasting epidemic trends, which had enabled officials to devise optimum disease control and prevention options.
A report by Science and Technology Daily, a newspaper affiliated to the ministry, said on Monday that a team of researchers from the National University of Defence Technology was working with scientists from Hunan province in using a supercomputer to create a simulated city to predict how the outbreak might develop.
The system simulates a city of 11 million people with 198 neighbourhoods, and replicates their family, work and social networks to see how such measures as reopening businesses and schools after a lockdown might affect disease control.
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