Coronavirus: China should avoid Singapore’s situation as schools go back, top expert says
- Zhong Nanshan tells education officials not to close campuses again if there are isolated cases of Covid-19 and to ‘be vigilant’ about protecting students
- He says the city state eased disease control and prevention efforts ‘too much and too quickly’ and had to reintroduce tough measures
Speaking during an online panel discussion, Zhong and other top communicable disease experts said it should be safe for students to go back to the classroom as there was a significantly lower risk of local transmission in China, though there was still a risk as it continued to spread rapidly elsewhere.
The discussion, organised by the Ministry of Education, took place on Monday but official media reported the details on Wednesday.
“China has already tamed the effective reproduction number [of the virus] to 0.2 or 0.3 – that’s very low and unlikely to cause a massive outbreak,” Zhong said. “But it’s impossible to expect that China will have no infections, and I staunchly support [the idea] that we should move on.”
Epidemiologists usually consider a reproduction number below 1 as an indicator that an outbreak could fade out. Some experts put the number in China at a range between 2.2 and 5.7 when the first cases were reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, in December.