. TORONTO — A prominent Canadian doctor who just returned from an experts’ mission in China to study the novel coronavirus outbreak praised the country’s “aggressive” response and advised the rest of the world to take heed. On Tuesday, Dr. Bruce Aylward, an epidemiologist and an assistant director-general for the World Health Organization (WHO), spoke in Geneva about his recent visit to China as the lead of an independent team of experts who examined the COVID-19 outbreak, which has sickened more than 77,600 and killed more than 2,600 in the country’s mainland.
The group consisted of 13 international experts and 12 Chinese nationals who travelled to Beijing, Guangdong province, Sichuan province, and the city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, to gauge the impact of Chinese measures to care for the infected and prevent further spread of the respiratory virus. After visiting with hundreds of health-care workers, government officials, volunteers, and residents across the country for a week, Aylward said his team determined that China had successfully managed to decrease the number of new cases with their “robust” approach.
“It’s the unanimous assessment of the team that they have changed the course of this outbreak,” he told a press conference in Geneva. “Hundreds of thousands of people in China did not get COVID-19 because of this aggressive response.” According to Aylward, China’s response to the pathogen includes case finding, tracing contact, social distancing, and movement restriction. He said the country has successfully reacted to the outbreak by taking a differentiated and tailored approach to various regions so as to not exhaust their resources.
The epidemiologist said one of the things he was most struck by during his visit was the country’s mobilization of people. He described China’s collective action and co-operation in their response as “phenomenal.”
Source:.ctvnews.ca
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
