China’s top Covid-19 fighter calls for all-in-one data portal like Europe’s EpiPulse

‘Complex and fragmented’ monitoring systems must be rolled into one, say Liang Wannian and co-authors of Lancet Regional Health West Pacific article

Lack of effective shared information system beyond healthcare also highlighted by disease expert Yang Weizhong and others in 2020 study

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Morning rush hour in Shanghai after the lifting of a months-long Covid-19 lockdown. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:49pm, 16 Jun 2022Updated: 11:22pm, 16 Jun 2022

Two-and-a-half years after China’s first Covid-19 cases, leading epidemiologist Liang Wannian has proposed the setting up of an EU-like integrated monitoring and early reporting system for a speedy response to future outbreaks.

The current data collection process is “complex and fragmented”, said Liang, head of China’s Covid-19 response team, as he called for the different monitoring systems to be rolled into an all-in-one network. This would cover not only human health data but also animal farm and waste water monitoring inputs, to help identify novel pathogens and provide seamless access to data on a single platform.

It would be akin to the EpiPulse integrated surveillance network launched by the European Union, Liang and his co-authors wrote in a recent article for the Lancet Regional Health West Pacific journal. EU health authorities launched the infectious diseases portal last June.

Liang Wannian (left) greets fellow members of a WHO Covid-19 mission, in Wuhan last year. Photo: AP

“China, as a large country with a population of 1.4 billion, has the responsibility to develop an efficient surveillance and early warning system to protect the health of the community, as well as use the system’s findings to communicate its observations globally,” wrote Liang and his colleagues at Tsinghua University’s Vanke School of Public Health and the University of New South Wales.

China set up its early warning systems on infectious diseases and direct reporting of emerging public health incidents after the deadly 2003 Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak and invested in them heavily. But these proved inadequate at coping with the Covid-19 outbreaks, other mainland researchers have said.

China’s coronavirus outbreak was officially reported on December 27, 2019, by Dr Zhang Jixian of the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine in Wuhan.

She had noticed seven cases of unusual pneumonia, four of them connected to the city’s Huanan wet market. A Wuhan Health Commission notice three days later, alerting hospitals on pneumonia patients without known diagnosis, went viral on social media and the National Health Commission sent out experts immediately.