ZJU4H Responds to Call of Duty in Sharing COVID-19 Experience with Abu Dhabi, Chile and Iraq

On March 30th, ZJU4H held another video conference with medical staffs from Abu Dhabi, Chile and Iraq as COVID-19 epidemic is becoming a global disease. The conference aims to share ZJU4H’s unique and frontline experience in fighting against COVID-19 during the last couple of months.

Dr. XU Zhihao, vice president of ZJU4H, Professor of Pneumology and Respiratory department host the meeting by first giving a brief introduction on ZJU4H and the experts present at the meeting. They are specialists from different departments such as Infectious Disease, Radiology, Nursing, Laboratory, ICU and Hospital Infection Control, who were all involved in COVID-19 treatment in the last three months.

Then, Dr. Xu moves on to introduce how ZJU4H has dealt with COVID-19 since the outbreak of the disease. Since ZJU4H started to admit COVID-19 patients on December, the hospital has established 3 groups for Prevention and Control of the disease.

The first group is Administration Group in charge of HR coordinating, formulating the protocols and staff training. The second group is Consulting Experts Group in charge of the complicated problems of COVID-19 in the frontline and also responsible for making the final decision in the personalized region for all the patients. And the third, also the last group is Logistic Group in charge of providing all the supplies for protection and daily life, which also plays a crucial part because in the early stage of the disease, ZJU4H was also facing a shortage of medical protection supplies. 

After the introduction, experts of ZJU4H answered the questions that have been presented in advance by medical workers from Abu Dhabi, Chile and Iraq. All these three countries are facing a growing number of COVID-19 patients and some of them have no experience at all in dealing with this new virus. The questions mainly focus on how to test and confirm COVID-19 patients, how to treat the patients and how healthcare workers can protect themselves while working on infected patients.

 A Free Discussion was followed after the Q&A part when all experts present at the video conference exchanged some ideas on how to deal with COVID-19. ZJU4H experts dispelled some misunderstandings on the prevention and control of the disease. For instance, in Chile, people have misunderstandings on wearing masks because their masks only have two layers, which are not effective in preventing them from getting infected while China uses masks with three layers. And for some medical workers, they are really concerned about how to protect themselves when experts from ZJU4H showed pictures of 3 levels of protection protocol via PowerPoint to help them better understand the issue.

The meeting was a big success in that specialists from different parts of the world join hands together to beat COVID-19. During the last two weeks, ZJU4H COVID-19 Consulting Platform has successfully held video conferences with 9 countries like UAE, India, Egypt, Iran, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan, Iraq, Columbia and Chile, in the hope of helping medical fellows all around the world to fight together against COVID-19.

In particular, Dr. CHEN Yagang, Chair of Department of Infection Disease and Professor of Epidemiology also joined some of the conferences and shared his experience in WUHAN. Dr. Chen has been fighting COVID-19 in WUHAN for 49 days.

“Although the information is limited, our heart stays together with you all.” Dr. Xu said at the end of the meeting.

Many thanks go to all the experts in ZJU4H who sacrificed their precious time and showed great patience in these days' video conferences. They are Dr. XU Jian, Dr. XU Zhihao, Dr. DU Xiaoxing, Dr. YANG Hong, Dr. LI Bing, Dr. WU Yingping, Dr. HU Sheng, Dr. ZHANG Huafang, Dr. YUAN Fengqin, Dr. HUANG Guangyu, Dr. WU Weifang, Dr. LIU Tian, Dr. CUI Ying, Dr. MO Jun, Dr. HU Honghua and Dr. ZHU Lin.