Dr. Nathanael Goldman lives and works in China, in Shanghai. This Belgian pediatrician, specializing in public health, experienced the coronavirus crisis in China from the inside.
Witnessing an exceptional and unprecedented situation, he tried at the end of January to alert Europe and in particular Belgium through articles and video capsules. Without much reaction…
Today, he is asking questions: what has Belgium done to avoid the current situation? Why have politicians, experts and the media been so slow to recognize the gravity of the situation? Questions that contain possible answers, supported by examples of better prepared countries.
When China decides to close a city, then a region, […] it’s obvious that something big is going on.
To understand Dr. Goldman’s approach, we have to go back to the beginning of the crisis. At the outset, as we know, there were the revelations of Dr. Li Wenliang… This young Chinese doctor launched an alert to the world on January 30 (first arrested then released, he died a little later of the coronavirus).
But at the beginning of January, we still don’t fully understand the gravity of what this whistleblower announced: “For us it was new at that time, explains Nathanael Goldman. We were naive about how it was going to develop, we thought it might be like SARS, we saw the streets that were starting to be deserted without imagining that it would spread all over the world “.
And then come the preparations for the Chinese New Year, the whole country is preparing to celebrate it with the family. “And boom, on January 23, Wuhan closes. That for me is a major fact, even if we don’t have very precise information, even if we don’t have the exact figures. There is a code: when China decides to close a city of 11 million inhabitants, then a region of 55 million, knowing that it is a people who work on Sundays and that the state is very stressed by growth economic, it is obvious that something major is happening.“
The doctor continues: “So it could not go unnoticed in embassies, consulates … If we had been able to close our eyes before, there was no longer any question of ignoring it. It had to go back to high places in Europe. happened after, I don’t know… “
The Belgian government saw nothing coming.
That’s when the idea for the videos came up. “I told myself that we had to convince people in Europe.“Faced with an unprecedented situation, the doctor first seeks information in the press articles. Later, he will support his videos and his articles with scientific facts and references.”I hadn’t forgotten that in Belgium there was still no government. We had to prepare and make the right decisions. And in the media in Europe, we did not say much, what was happening in China, it went above the head.“
“The Belgian government saw nothing coming, neither the French nor the British. But this is not the case with Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, which took action very early on. Limitation of flights, trackings, tests … In Taiwan, they are 6 dead! In Korea, it’s a little bit special, they had one person who contaminated hundreds of others. But they started mass testing and they managed to go from a situation where there were thousands of cases to a significant decrease“It should be noted that South Korea reported 229 deaths as of April 16.
Taiwan and South Korea’s reaction
“Between the end of January, when we had the information, and the establishment of containment, a month and a half passed. What did we do during this period? Maggie De Block and others say they have worked hard. What have they done to avoid the current situation? We live in a democracy, we must make the truth out of respect for the people who died and the bereaved families “.
But what could we do to anticipate the arrival of the epidemic? “First schedule the testsanswers Dr. Goldman: it is the B.A.-BA of epidemiology, it is by isolating the cases that we can limit the contamination. What has been done to increase the capacity to be tested and what has been done to find the cases and to isolate them and avoid a situation where we are overwhelmed? You know, in Taiwan, the economy is not stopping, schools are not closed, everyday life continues because they took the measurements in time, when it was not yet necessary to test massively “.
“It is extremely sad to see that in a system, in Europe, where we have a great medical history, expertise, access to information, a multilingual system … How did we get there? You have to answer to change that in futur “.
Is it a good time to ask these questions and seek responsibility?
“Clearly, the emergency is to put out the fire, people are dying, all the resources must be deployed to do that. One way to do it is to limit new outbreaks Because there are several. So far nothing has been done to identify these new outbreaks, or else somebody must show me the evidence. ”
At a time when we are starting to think about breaking out of confinement, the challenge is daunting and for this too, the doctor suggests looking into what has been experienced elsewhere. “It is the job of the government to be open to suggestions that can help get out of this terrible situation. So when I hear people say than masks, it’s scientifically proven that it doesn’t work, when Maggie De Block says such things, it’s incompetence, it’s ignorance of medicine, we’re not going to prove that masks don’t don’t work, because we’ve never been in such situations! All we know at the moment is that when you are sick and you wear a mask you reduce the expression of the virus outside and you do not need to have an IQ of 150 to tell yourself that when you are not sick, or that you are asymptomatic, and that you put on a mask, you will also automatically decrease the amount of virus that you excrete unconsciously! “
On this subject of wearing a generalized mask, the doctor does not hide his anger: “If we are not prepared, we must say: ‘Sorry, we are not prepared, we do not have masks because we have not seen coming, because we do not have or more industries which produce masks. We don’t have tests because we don’t have industries that make them and for a month and a half we didn’t anticipate anything because China is far away and the Italians are the Italians and that as Mediterranean people they tend to exaggerate everything and then their health system it’s worth what it’s worth but we Belgians, we French, it’s something else! ‘ The Germans took another approach. They have an industry, they started producing tests, they told all their labs in all of their states : now you produce all the parts you can we need everyone’s collaboration. It’s war economy, they understood that. “
In Europe, we have to use the Chinese experience
China is at the deconfinement stage, in Belgium we talk about it and we think about it. A delicate phase: “In my opinion, things will have to be reopened in an extremely gradual manner, and I must say that the Chinese government, after hiding a lot of things, we feel that there is intelligent communication behind, there is wisdom. They have very clear knowledge of the information in all the provinces that go back to the central level and they know very well what to do.“
“In Europe, we have to use the Chinese experience, we have to try to understand diplomatically the experiences they have had by reopening such and such businesses, cinemas, theaters … From when they saw a revival of transmission. We have to put members of the economic world around the table, people from civil society, but above all, people will have to say things clearly.. “
–
