Author: Yang Chengchen

Translated by: Wang Dingying, Wu Xia

"The emergence of such an epidemic is a very unfortunate incident. In the face of the epidemic, Wuhan has taken many measures. Students throughout the country and the world should not lose confidence in this city."

Tang Qizhu, Member of Party Standing Committee of WHU, Vice President of WHU, Dean of MUSM, recently accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from China News Service, pointing out that after the epidemic passed, many fields related to it were worthy of academic research, including the response to major public health emergencies involves political, economic, social, scientific and technological aspects. In addition to the medical field, we have many topics worth exploring in depth.

Tang Qizhu emphasized that in-depth research on the occurrence, development and fighting of the epidemic situation, and its results and experience in prevention and control will help improve the government's governance capacity. "The fight against the new pneumonia epidemic itself is a living textbook with complex content and heavy weight. We should learn a lot from our experience and lessons.

Tang Qizhu is the only member of current leadership team that majored in clinical medicine at Wuhan University. After the outbreak of the epidemic, he paid close attention to the development of the epidemic and devoted a lot of energy to school epidemic prevention. At present, there are nearly 900 students staying on campus.

"There are undergraduates, graduate students, and international students staying in the school, their lives and studies are well organized," he said, "we have students diagnosed with the infection. This was learnt after they returned home during the holiday. These students have also been effectively cured locally.”

The new semester was originally planned to begin in mid-February, and will be postponed. Tang Qizhu said that the postponement would have a certain impact on teaching. However, Wuhan University has prepared related plans to ensure that students' learning is not delayed.

Renmin Hospital and Zhongnan Hospital were the main battlefields of the epidemic. Tang Qizhu, former Dean of the People's Hospital, said that these two hospitals have undertaken a large number of clinical patient rescue work, and at the same time carried out clinical observation of cases, rapid diagnosis of pathogens and treatment of new technologies and methods, as well as played a leading role in preventing and controlling the novel coronavirus.

The Infectious Diseases Unit of Renmin Hospital successively accepted more than 70 patients with severe new coronavirus, and the medical staff in the department has achieved zero infection; Zhongnan Hospital improved the efficiency of the detection of the new coronavirus nucleic acid, and successfully rescued the critically-ill patients with mobile cardiopulmonary instrument technology.

However, Tang Qizhu observed that both hospitals have infected medical staff, which makes him worrisome. Most of these infections occur in wards other than the infectious disease department and intensive medicine department. Patients with the new pneumonia who do not know or have no symptoms seek treatment for other diseases. They are not adequately protected, which leads to the infection of medical staff. Fortunately, most of these medical staff are recovering. So far, “no life accident has been heard”, and a recovered nursing staff at Zhongnan Hospital has returned to work.

He further pointed out that as the understanding of disease development and clinical manifestations became clearer, the prevention and treatment level of the two hospitals was continuously improved, and the diagnosis and treatment measures were continuously improved. Protecting medical personnel is an important part of the next epidemic prevention work.

Tang Qizhu pointed out that as a comprehensive university under the construction of "Double First-Rate", the virology research is in the international first-class level. In fact, from the outbreak to the present, the State Key Laboratory of Virology and the Institute of Medical Virology of the University have made important contributions in virus discovery, traceability, and nucleic acid detection. At present, the School is making overall plans and organizing relevant scientists and researchers to coordinate research in areas such as vaccine and antibodies development, drug screening, and make efforts to fight against this battle in Wuhan.