11 extreme measures China took to contain the coronavirus show the rest of the world is unprepared for COVID-19

People who thought they had the novel coronavirus in China would often be sent to a special fever clinic, which have been widespread since the country dealt with an aggressive SARS outbreak in 2002. Their temperature would be taken, and they'd discuss their symptoms, medical history, travel history, and any prior contact with anyone infected with a doctor.

If necessary, patients might receive a CT scan, which is one way to do an initial screening for COVID-19.

"Each machine did maybe 200 a day. Five, 10 minutes a scan," Aylward told the New York Times. "A typical hospital in the West does one or two an hour."

After all that, if you were still a suspect case, you'd get swabbed and a coronavirus PCR test would be run through a machine. Even during the peak of the outbreak, a lot of people came in to the fever clinics with colds, flus, and runny noses, looking for reassurance they didn't have the novel coronavirus.

In the Chinese province of Guangdong, for example, which is a more than 10-hour drive away from Wuhan, there were 320,000 COVID-19 tests done in the clinics. At the peak of the outbreak, only 0.47% of those tests were positive for the coronavirus.

More recently, there's been a massive drop in the amount of people coming to the clinics worried that they're sick.

"According to the national data, fever clinics went from seeing 46,000 people per day at one point, and it's now down to 1,000," Aylward told Vox.

Patients in the fever clinics who were confirmed to have the coronavirus were either sent to an isolation center or hospital, Aylward told the Times.

"In Wuhan, in the beginning, it was 15 days from getting sick to hospitalization," he said. "They got it down to two days from symptoms to isolation."

The government also made clear that testing for the new virus was free, and COVID-19-related charges that weren't covered by a person's insurance would be paid for by the government.

In the US, COVID-19 testing capacity still lags far behind many other countries. Though drive-through testing sites are opening up in certain spots, public health laboratories have tested just over 22,713 specimens across the US. In South Korea, a country that is one-sixth the size, more than 274,000 people have been tested for the novel coronavirus so far, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"South Korea and China got through this in two to four weeks," Dr. Rishi Desai, a former epidemic intelligence service officer in the CDC Division of Viral Diseases told Business Insider. "The dangerous thing is that our healthcare system stands to get overrun."

China built two new 1,000-1,300-bed hospitals to fight the coronavirus, one created in six days, and the second in 15 days, using prefabricated modules.

This isn't the first time China has quickly manufactured hospitals dedicated to handling outbreaks. During the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, Beijing built a hospital in seven days with 7,000 people working day and night.

Other buildings got repurposed to support more coronavirus patients, too.

"They would convert a training center or a stadium in between 24 and 72 hours," Aylward said. "That was the time frame they took in Wuhan to increase by a thousand their capacity."

The ramp-up of bed space has not been perfect, though. At least one makeshift quarantine spot set up in a hotel in Quanzhou collapsed, killing 10 people.

In addition to China's quickly-created hospitals, China also took pre-existing hospitals and repurposed them to solely handle patients with the novel coronavirus, sealing them off from others.

"You had to take whole hospitals and take them out of general service and make them basically response hospitals for COVID 19 cases," Aylward said. "What China's done, rather than have some beds that are isolation beds, is at the start of that ward, they built a wall with a window on it. They seal the whole thing and said a full ward, that whole 40 beds to 100 beds, is now an isolation unit."

Speed was also key to containing the crisis, he said.

"I think the key learning from China is speed — it's all about the speed," Aylward told Vox in a later interview. "The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you're going to be."

During the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, China set up large-scale surveillance systems that included contact tracing, a front-line public-health strategy that involves identifying and following up with people who may have come into contact with an infected person.

The contact tracing technology Chinese public health officials used was "idiot-proof," according to Aylward. If a tracer made a mistake on their forms, their screen flashed a yellow alert.

During a World Health Organization press conference last Wednesday categorizing the novel coronavirus as a pandemic, WHO's executive director, Dr. Michael Ryan, said some countries "have been too willing to give up on contact tracing at a very early stage of the fight against the epidemic."

He emphasized that the strategy is an effective, inexpensive, and "very basic public health intervention" compared to broad measures like social distancing, which is more burdensome and doesn't work if there's no cultural buy-in.

"When people move towards broader-based social distancing measures," he said, "it effectively accepts that the chains of transmission are no longer visible."

Chinese public health officials have attempted to trace near every single one of the 80,000-plus cases in that country.

Emergency centers tracking the virus across the country use huge screens that show every disease cluster. Officials militantly track where cases are spreading, with governors not hesitating to call local field teams when they have questions, as Aylward witnessed on his trip.

"They pulled up another screen, and there was the team that was out in the field actually trying to do this," he said. "The whole thing is linked up, and they're in constant contact trying to make sure that together they solve the problems of trying to sort out the transmission ... they have changed the course of this outbreak."

Chinese social media including Weibo, Tencent, and WeChat also shared out accurate, up to date information on the virus, providing a counter to fake coronavirus garlic cures and other disease misinformation on the internet.

"You could have Facebook and Twitter and Instagram do that," Aylward said.

Elective surgeries and other non-critical doctors visits were delayed, and many medical services were moved online, Aylward told reporters.

"Someone in one place said 50% of their consultations are now done online; they just moved a whole bunch of what was normally done physically online to be able to keep the regular health services going, prescriptions turned over, etc., in a very orderly manner," Aylward said.

But the move hasn't been without negative consequences. One man with kidney disease in China jumped to his death, Human Rights Watch reported. He couldn't get dialysis during the outbreak.

Overcrowded medical systems are one of the biggest concerns with coronavirus outbreaks in other parts of the world, too.

The US's roughly 95,000 intensive care unit beds could get filled as the coronavirus outbreak worsens, and equipment like ventilators, space to treat patients, and staff to care for them may all face shortages, Business Insider previously reported.

In Italy, those fears are already a reality, with medical supplies and hospital bed shortages reportedly forcing doctors to choose which coronavirus patients to save first.

In China, practical barriers to staying put in order to prevent spreading or contracting the illness were largely eliminated, Aylward told the Times.

"Fifteen million people had to order food online. It was delivered," he said. "Yes, there were some screw-ups. But one woman said to me 'every now and again there's something missing from a package, but I haven't lost any weight.'"

In other parts of the world, by contrast, fears about quarantining have led to panic-buying supplies, and shortages of toilet paper.

When it came to the non-medical response, Aylward said there was a nationwide sense of solidarity with Hubei. Other provinces sent 40,000 medical workers to the center of the outbreak, many of whom were volunteers.

Workers in transportation, agriculture, and clerical positions were reassigned to new positions, too.

"A highway worker might take temperatures, deliver food, or become a contact tracer," Aylward told the New York Times. "In one hospital, I met the woman teaching people how to gown up. I asked, 'You're the infection control expert?' No, she was a receptionist. She'd learned."

In contrast to reports in the US of people clamoring over the last hand-sanitizer, Aylward said he was struck by the attitude of people in China that they were all in this together.

"This is not a village," he said of Wuhan, which is bigger than New York City. "As you drive into this city, in the dead of night, the lights on, it's a ghost town. But behind every window and every skyscraper there are people cooperating with this response."

Still, the human cost of this widespread compliance with China's strict disease-fighting measures may never truly be known.

"Most Chinese people can't get on Twitter or Facebook to tell their COVID-19 stories, as these and many other global platforms are blocked in China, and government censors speedily scrub away posts describing virus-related events on Chinese social media platforms," Human Rights Watch China Researcher Yaqiu Wang wrote recently online. "Because it's well-known in China that expressing criticism toward the government can bring you trouble, even long prison time."

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