It seems a world away since Dr Bruce Aylwood gave his press conference on 25 Feb 2020 on his return from China with teams looking at how China has dealt with COVID-19
Dr. Bruce Aylward, International team lead for the World Health Organization-China joint mission on COVID-19 held a news conference in Geneva and told reporters that China’s mobilization to handle the virus outbreak showed how aggressive policy steps could curb the disease’s spread.
I made the following notes when I watched the video at time, more than a year ago. How horribly mismatched with what has followed, it seems now:
At the 50th minute he said the main driver of the spread of infection was within the family and at the 53rd minute and then again at the one hour and 18 minutes he said that should not be a false sense of security in other countries because China had driven down the bell curve and stopped this thing or has appeared to stop it. But that China was still building hospitals and ventilators to cope with a possible resurgence.
At one hour 13 minutes he said that the (the teams) respected the 2m distance between people when they were there that is outside of any risk of infection to themselves anyway.
At one hour and 23 he said the reason the mortality rate was so high to begin with in Wuhan was because they simply recognised the cases later in the development of the disease for the individuals.
In response to a question about how the symptoms present he said 88% had fever 68% had a dry cough and only 4% had a runny nose and that the other symptom was that a person would feel a general sort of malaise and aching bones and a feeling of being unwell.
Photograph Works 