US and China Pledge to Work Together to Combat COVID-19
American and Chinese health officials promised to work together to fight the novel coronavirus, on a phone call Monday night. Their communications could not come soon enough, as New York State surpassed Hubei Province, China, with the highest number of reported COVID-19 cases on Tuesday.
China’s Health Minister Ma Xiaowei and his American counterpart, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, had their first exchange since January. Their pledge of cooperation came less than a week after U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke with each other by phone, agreeing to work together to fight the spread of COVID-19.
After his phone call, President Trump tweeted, “China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!”
While China has largely contained the spread of coronavirus within its borders, the country is now dealing with the threat of imported cases from abroad. To stymie this alarming trend, China temporarily barred most foreigners from entering the country on Friday and has reduced the number of incoming flights. Moreover, all international travelers and returnees entering China must quarantine at a government approved center. Beijing’s restrictive measures have become a game plan other countries have worked hard to implement in their own attempts to ward off the virus. China said its latest choice to close its borders was “responsible and necessary.”
But while China’s borders may be closed to incoming foreign nationals, their factories are continuing to ramp up production to provide the personal protective equipment (PPEs) so desperately needed across the world. The White House air lifted much-needed medical equipment from China to the U.S. earlier in the week, and plans on sending more planes to China in the near future to expedite the shipment of life saving equipment to frontline medical workers and hospitals in the U.S.
The United States had closed its borders to all foreign nationals who’d recently spent time in China back on February 1. This move was supposed to slow the spread of the virus within the U.S. But the country’s failure to widely test suspected cases let the virus spread unknown in communities past the point of containment.
Coronavirus clearly knows no borders, and an international effort to reign in the novel pathogen is required for countries to be successful. Moreover, as the world’s two largest economies, joint efforts by China and the U.S. will be necessary to restart the global economy when the pandemic ends.