Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, known for his fluency in Chinese, has recently written an emotional open letter to “Chinese friends,” making a plea to purchase medical supplies from China to help fight COVID-19 in Australia and New York state.
Many countries are facing an acute shortage of such medical supplies as COVID-19 continues to ravage the world.
On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said his state would need at least 30,000 ventilators at the ready within 45 days to handle the coronavirus contingencies, but the state now only has 5,000-6,000. The face mask shortage in the United States has also prompted the U.S. CDC to loosen coronavirus guidance. On March 11, the CDC had to recommend doctors use looser- fitting surgical face masks as “an acceptable alternative” because masks known as N95 respirators were in short supply.
We all know if we cannot protect medical workers and care-givers from being infected, no one is safe, and the pandemic will spiral into an even worse catastrophe.
Besides these medical supplies that give medical workers protection, test kits are also instrumental in bringing COVID-19 under control. The U.S. and many other countries are encountering problems in testing surging numbers of possibly infected people. In contrast, South Korea has done a great job in curbing the spread of the virus, mostly by giving widely available tests. In some facilities, test results are given within a mere seven minutes.
The Chinese mainland has seen domestic infection dwindle from hundreds, even thousands a day to zero or nearly zero for several days after implementing effective and forceful measures. The success in stopping new domestic infections provides an opportunity for the country to export medical supplies to countries that are hard hit by COVID-19, in addition to donations by the Chinese Government and institutions.
In January and February, China also faced a grimy situation in providing medical workers adequate protection and making face masks available to its huge population. Many Chinese manufacturers acted quickly, converting existing factory premises to face mask production lines. In addition to many smaller factories, industrial giants such as automaker BYD and domestic appliances giant Gree have made the foray into the field of mask and respirator production. Eighteen mask producers in Shenzhen, mostly founded within a short time to combat the epidemic, produce more than 10 million masks a day, while the whole country is now capable of manufacturing 200 million face masks a day, according to media reports.
Many garment factories have used their existing machinery and manpower to produce protective gear. The manufacturing of medical gloves and disinfectants has also been ramped up.
Nucleic acid test kits, which are instrumental in fighting COVID-19, are also being manufactured in China in large quantities. Detection kits developed by technology firms in Guangdong have been used in over 60 countries. Companies in Guangdong and other parts of China had scaled up their production of test kits to 2 million a day by late February.
To make sure cities that are in most urgent need of shoring up defense for medical workers can source these supplies, countries should work together, not only by matching the manufacturers with buyers, but also in removing obstacles — such as red tape in customs clearance and disruption of logistics — that hinder timely delivery.
Countries should now show solidarity and establish an international coordination mechanism immediately. With such a mechanism in place, Chinese manufacturers will be able to further ramp up production and deliver those life-saving materials to other parts of the world in the shortest time possible.