CHINA’S BATTLE AGAINST COVID-19

So far, seven outbreaks of coronavirus have been confirmed globally. As late as December 2019, humans have encountered a new coronavirus that has never been found in humans body. Our knowledge of this virus is still sketchy. It has been named COVID-19.

CHINA’S BATTLE AGAINST COVID-19

The New Enemy of Mankind Home to eight Nobel Prize Laureates, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is known as the birthplace of molecular biology. Dr. John Olson is a scientist at CSHL.

In December 2019, he was teaching courses in Suzhou, China. Confronted with COVID-19, Dr. John Olson chose to stay.

Dr. John Olson: "Like initially I saw lots of things calling it the Wuhan virus. I am really not in favor of that, right? Because these viruses can come from anywhere. Coronaviruses are in bat species around the world.

Что было очень удивительным и невероятным для меня, was how fast the virus was identified and sequenced. If you look at a virus like HIV, it was years before the virus was identified. And here it was about ten days from the time that people starting to get sick to we had the actual DNA sequence of the virus.

And then once it’s identified and sequenced, we can move forward very quickly in our understanding. I think they have been open and transparent. I think a lot of the problem in the beginning was there just wasn’t the ability to confirm of a person is or is not positive for this novel coronavirus, because there are other cold viruses out there and the influenza virus which can give similar symptoms early on.

And so there was a sort of bottleneck of the number of technicians that can do the testing. And then also the kits to be able to do the testing. And so it took time to start to get reliable numbers, but those numbers are being updated every day. And I think the information has been, you know, clear and accurate as it can be".

Chinese scientists quickly released the genetic sequence information of COVID-19 and scientists across the globe began to work at full speed to develop vaccines and drugs to deal with it.

But the spread of rumors was much faster than that of drug development. The most appalling rumors even said that COVID-19 came from the laboratory. Anytime there is an outbreak, there is going to be a lot of conspiracy theories and misinformation. It’s unfortunate that some US lawmakers actually succumb to this misinformation and spread these rumors.