George F. Gao, Director-General, China CDC, Spoke at the launching ceremony of Institute for Global Health and Development, Peking University (PKU-iGHD) and the Beijing Forum 2020: COVID-19 Shocks to Global Health and Development:

Good morning, everybody. I'm sorry I can't be in the meeting in person, as you know because we have some sporadic cases in China, as per the China CDC, so I have to meet you remotely here, I'm sorry for that. I'd like to record something to share my view about global health. My topic today would be China's fight against Covid-19, and active involvement in global health.

As you know, Covid-19 virus was first discovered in Wuhan, China, and in historically record time we estimated the virus, we did the sequencing for the whole genome and we did diagnosis experiments. We defined all the parameters for the epidemiology, including the incubation period, including the transmission route.

And then because of these scientific discoveries, we are trying to get the public actually involved and try to make sure the public understands what we are doing, and called the public for complying with all the necessary Non Pharmaceutical Intervention measures.

And more importantly, from the very beginning, because of the political will, political decision authority, we made a great deal, we made a great decision: to have a containment for a long time for Wuhan. We tried to define from the very beginning in China the frontline. First of course it's Wuhan. Then it was Hubei, outside of Wuhan. And then we put the third line as the whole country, china

Of course, it's very important to have a political center of Beijing, the capital. Say that's very positive. We put that one as a priority as well. So lucky, we successfully controlled this disease in Wuhan by early April. This was a great achievement by using the containment measures, by introducing all these Non Pharmaceutical Intervention strategies.

So after that, as you know, the disease is relatively under control in China, yet we have a pandemic. And in China, we have so many important cases, sporadic cases. And then we have at least eight waves of important cases for the local transmission. By using epidemiological investigators to try to trace back all of those patients zero, and by doing the sequencing for the virus causing any sporadic cases, we successfully suppressed all these sporadic cases. So in my view, in China, in addition to Hubei and Wuhan, we already have seven successful controls of the seven waves, but of course, not at the moment, since we have some sporadic cases wave in several provinces.

Of course, we accumulate very, very important experience to get this down. For me, this method we call it “Whack-A-Mole”. Whack-A-Mole means ‘suppress anything as it begins to appear’. So what I would say, is that the experience in China is because we have a very strong community level public health support.

I'm calling everybody in the world: don't give up, go back to your community, try to encourage the community level public health workers to trace back any patients zero, try to do the sequencing (of the virus) and try to figure out what is going on.

As you know, at the moment, in the UK, through sequencing they know they have a new variant in the south of England, especially in the London area. I think at the moment they're doing very well, and what they were doing is they tried to stop it, they are trying to do some kind of lock-down measures, so this is very important. Recently, I was asked by a journal, Lancet Public Health, why and how we got this achievement in China. So I'm saying here: strengthening your community level public health is the key. Active case finding and control of the close contacts is the key. So you should go back to your community level to get the disease down.

As for global health, because this is the major topic of this session. In my opinion, China, in terms of global health, we are the newcomers. I know that America, Europe, you have been actively involved in public global health for a long time. You have a long history for the involvement and evolution of global public health. In China, we have a lot to learn from you. But we are determined to be involved actively in global health.

I will give you an example. In 2014, when we had an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I myself led a team fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone. We built on BSL free lab within 87 days there, so at the moment, BSL free lab is still very actively involved the COVID-19 control in Sierra Leone.

As you know, recently, we announced IFCA CDC building, is already easy for this building to be built, they have the opening ceremony. You might read all this news. So clearly, you can see the Chinese government pretty clearly. you clearly see we are doing it. We are going to do for the building, more importantly, in my China CDC, we have a lot of training programs in collaboration with our US CDC and international collaborators, including NGOs such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We ran a lot of training programs for African public health professionals. So this is something we are doing at the moment very, very actively.

And more importantly, to make China do more outreach to the world for global health. I think we learn a lot from the US CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). In China, last year in China CDC we initiated a journal called China CDC Weekly. There we like to share our experience for public health, to share our field work in china, to report any public health events in China, we also invite international professionals to join us, to publish something here to share with everybody in the world, to keep China as an open country, to keep China transparent on the public health issues in the world.

This is very, very important in my opinion. Especially with some virus like this one, Covid-19, which travels without a passport, without making applications for a visa. So for all these emerging and re-emerging viruses, all those important public health issues, we’ve got to work together: US, China, and many other countries. We’ve got to collaborate. Like at the moment what we are doing for Covid-19 control. I think we try our best to share all our data with our colleagues internationally.

In my opinion, I would propose four principles for this collaboration.

The first principle is cooperation. We've got to cooperate with each other, and as the other side of this coin: competition, to make progress for science we need a kind of competition.

So collaboration and competition, they are twin brothers and twin sisters. So we got to put this in our mind to think how we can work together. Of course, from time to time, communication. We need to communicate with each other, only if we communicate efficiently and we can have very good collaboration, we can have very good communication. In that way, public health science, and science in general, can only progress forward. Otherwise we might say, where we are at the moment?

More importantly, my fourth proposed principle is coordination. So the world needs a kind of coordinated effort. We need a united organization, like the World Health Organization, the WHO. The WHO, or WHO-like organizations, will play a very, very important role for us to tackle some problems like this.

COVID-19 is the first pandemic of the 21st century with novel coronavirus. But this will not be the last. Because we have been working so hard to try to find out the origin of this virus, but there is no luck. This virus might have been already with us for a while. It might come from the wild, from wild animals. But we haven't found any intermediate host or reservoir host, that means there might be another coronavirus in a latency state, somewhere.

So again, I'm calling for the collaboration, to work together. Only in that way we can seek global health, we can only have a safer world. The world needs China and China needs the world. Without public health, the economy, the society, they’re nothing. So we’ve got to work together, try to protect our Earth from any emerging and re-emerging viruses or pathogens.

I'm especially calling for a collaborative effort, for the control of microbial resistant, antibiotic resistant pathogens. This is also very important: Don't give up anything with regards to microbial resistant bugs. We, in addition to working together for the control of viruses like Covid-19. I, as Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, I believe we are ready to work together with you. I hope we can team up to work together for this global health.

Global really means global. In this world, we are interdependent. We are in a globalized world. So globalization, inter dependency, are the key characteristics of the current world. Let's team up and work together for the global health. Thank you.