A pharmacist weighs Chinese herbal medicines for patients infected with the novel coronavirus at Anhui Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, Feb. 18, 2020. (Xinhua/Bai Bin)

One Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) therapy on patients infected with the novel coronavirus was found to be 97.78 percent effective, and none of the cases turned from mild to severe or critical, according to a media report.

Based on 1,261 infections from 10 provinces in China who had been treated by one TCM therapy, lung-clearing and detoxification decoction, 97.78 percent of them have shown the therapy's effectiveness, domestic news site thepaper.cn reported on Saturday, citing Tong Xiaolin, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and head of a treatment group at the National Administration of TCM.

Among the 1,261 patients, 1,102 were cured by Friday, 29 have seen symptoms disappear, and 71 have improved, Tong introduced.

For 40 serious cases, 28 of them have been discharged after receiving the TCM therapy treatment, 12 are still in hospital and 10 others have turned to mild infections, he said.

On February 6, China's National Health Commission and National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine jointly announced a recommendation to apply the lung-clearing and detoxification decoction in COVID-19 treatment, based on 214 effective cases in clinical trials.

Different from Western medicine that initiate treatment when patients get confirmed by a test, TCM therapies offer treatment based on symptoms not only for the confirmed cases, but also for suspected cases, said Wen Chengping, deputy president of Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, who has participated on the frontline treating patients in Hangzhou Xixi Hospital, an affiliate of the university.

With rounds of clinical usage, which showed fair effectiveness, Chinese experts brought two types of TCM therapies to Iraq and Italy to help combat the virus, the People's Daily reported, citing Zhang Boli, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a member of the central government expert group in Wuhan.

In a clinical experiment in early February, which was based on 102 mildly infected patients, the turning rate to severe infections was 11.8 percent with TCM therapy, while the control group treated with Western medicine was 29.4 percent, Zhang introduced.

Other experimental factors, including fever clearance time and nucleic acid turning negative time, all showed better results compared to the control group treated with Western medicine.

Global Times