QUITO, June 7 (Xinhua) -- China's white paper on the country's battle against COVID-19 is an invaluable scientific and medical resource, an Ecuadorian microbiologist has said.
"The scientific information and experiences they are sharing will be a great help," Alfredo Bruno, who has served as an occasional adviser to the Pan American Health Organization, told Xinhua in a recent interview.
Titled "Fighting COVID-19: China in Action," the document was released Sunday by China's State Council Information Office.
The Chinese government released the white paper to keep a record of the country's own efforts to fight the virus, to share its experience with the rest of the world, and to clarify its ideas on the global battle, according to the white paper.
"It will be of great value for all countries to be able to share China's experience in combating the virus: how they handled it, what tests they used, all of the diagnostic methods and the effective scientific treatment they provided," said Bruno.
Additionally, it would be very useful to learn about the different social distancing strategies China used to contain the spread of the virus, its use of data to identify focal points of transmission, and how it was able to build field hospitals at record-breaking speeds, added Bruno.
China's domestic virus-fighting tactics were very effective, said the expert, who heads the National Reference Center of Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses at Ecuador's National Institute for Public Health Research.
"From the beginning they strove to swiftly detect the virus and genetically sequence it," he said, noting China's National Genomics Data Center posted that information on a global genome data bank.
"That allowed every country to be able to develop the diagnostic tools that in turn allowed them to rapidly detect the novel coronavirus, in contrast to other epidemics," said Bruno.
Thanks to China, Ecuador was able "to determine how the virus evolved, which strains it was most closely related with, and to confirm that the tools it had to detect the virus served to make a quality diagnosis," Bruno said.
China's technological edge also helped the country to effectively curb the virus, he said.
"China has developed applications to see the evolution of COVID-19 cases in real time and very useful tools to detect cases that have tested positive and can become transmitters. That is of great value and lets you reduce contact between people to a minimum," he added.
Bruno, a member of the team of specialists that first detected the AH1N1 virus that caused the swine flu in Ecuador, also praised China's donations to many countries impacted by the pandemic as having "been of great help."
He said he "completely agree(s)" with China's call for greater global cooperation to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The only way we can tackle it is for all of us to unite regardless of political beliefs and social conditions," said Bruno. Enditem
