Why is there no any mass explosion of COVID-19 in the nursing homes in China?

It is important to note that the information provided in this Series is intended for your general knowledge only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment.

At the beginning of the epidemic, a few senior citizens from some nursing homes in Wuhan caught the COVID-19, and all of them were timely sent to hospitals and received proper treatment there. On this basis, the Chinese government ordered that all the nursing homes must implement total lockdown management so as to prevent the occurrence of imported cases and built up some strong defense for all the nursing homes in China against the epidemic, through carrying out early discovery, early reporting, early quarantine, early treatment, as well as efficient checking, collection and treatment.

Firstly, all the nursing homes are required to practice total lockdown management. The measures include ceasing of receiving any outside visitors or senior citizens who wish to live in the nursing home. Well, inside each nursing home, no any group activity is allowed; all the residents are required to eat separately; safety service is strengthened, and daily sterilization and body temperature testing are also practiced. During the epidemic, civil affairs authorities pay much attention to the guidance and supervision concerning the implementation of the management requirements as required of the nursing homes. They also make efforts to solve all problems very timely and hold all nursing homes responsible for any failure to efficiently implement the epidemic prevention and control measures, which effectively ensured the professionalism and normativity of various anti-epidemic measures.

Secondly, strengthen the professional epidemic prevention and control guidance for the nursing homes and coordinate the services of care providers across the nation. The Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council issued a series of epidemic prevention and control guidance and relevant regulatory documents for the Chinese nursing organizations; it also published medical guide for the senior citizens at nursing homes, as well as epidemic prevention and control work guide for the medical and nursing organizations. To deal with the problem of shortage of nursing workers, the national departments of health and civil affairs work together with local governments to provide multiple cross-city and cross-province nursing assistance. At the same time, they try hard to provide comprehensive training and guidance in terms of professional epidemic prevention and control for the nursing homes, by seeking help from the nearly one thousand professional workers in epidemic control who have come from different areas in China to help the Hubei and Wuhan people.

Thirdly, proper publicity and education work have been done for the senior citizens. At the beginning of the epidemic, the national health department published some open letters for all the senior citizens in China, and requested that they should view the matter in a correct way. They should not show any indifference towards the epidemic, nor should they worry too much about it; but instead, they should try to prevent and fight against it in a scientific manner. At the same time, government departments work hard to spread anti-epidemic knowledge among the senior citizens, by printing pinyin and comic versions of publicity materials which use simple language as well as a combination of texts and pictures. On the other hand, the nursing homes actively teach anti-epidemic knowledge to the elderly, and provide them psychological guidance service in a timely manner.

Author: Zhong Sheng