China has no new cases of Covid-19 reported for five days in a row
China has no new confirmed cases caused by local transmission of coronavirus having been reported for five days in row.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has confirmed this is evidence of initial success for the social distancing policy implemented by the Chinese to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
For the first time since the outbreak began, there have been no new confirmed cases caused by local transmission in China reported for five consecutive days up to 23 March.
This is an indication that social distancing measures enacted in China have led to control of Covid-19 in the country.
At the peak of the outbreak in China in early February, there were between 2,000 and 4,000 new confirmed cases per day.
The Covid-19 epidemic was declared a Global Pandemic by WHO on 11 March.
As of 20 March, over 254,000 cases and 10,000 deaths had been reported worldwide.
The outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December.
In response to the fastgrowing epidemic, China imposed strict social distancing in Wuhan on 23 January followed closely by similar measures in other provinces throughout the country.
The WHO Collaborating
Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling within the Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, J-IDEA and Imperial College London released their 11th report on the Covid-19 pandemic yesterday.
The authors of the report say the interventions have also impacted economic productivity in China, and the ability of the Chinese economy to resume without restarting the epidemic is not yet clear.
In the report, WHO estimates transmissibility from reported cases and compares those estimates with daily data on within-city movement, as a proxy for economic activity.
Initially, within-city movement and transmission were very strongly correlated in the five provinces most affected by the epidemic and Beijing. However, that correlation is no longer apparent even though within-city movement has started to increase.
Professor Neil M Ferguson, of Imperial College London, said: “This analysis provides some hope for countries currently in various levels of lockdown that once case numbers are brought to low levels, it might be possible to relax social distancing – provided equal measures to limit the risk of the resurgence of transmission are introduced.
“Such suppression maintenance policies will likely need to rely on rapid and ubiquitous testing and rigorous case and contact isolation policies.”