Photo: Li Hao/GT

China has accumulated mature experience in treating severe COVID-19 cases in the past three years, which is enough to deal with the current situation, a leading infectious diseases doctor told the Global Times, while calling for calmness and order rather than confusion or panic.

Li Taisheng, director of the Infectious Diseases Department with the Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH), previously fought against COVID-19 in Central China's Wuhan in 2020.

During 81 days at the front line, Li worked with his colleagues on improving the success rate of saving patients with severe symptoms and gradually figured out mature medical plans, which have been drawn on by many Western medical experts to deal with their countries' critical cases.

Li said the key to improving the success rate of saving critical cases is to intervene and treat the patient early. "The most important thing during the process is to find the clear early warning signs of the case becoming critical."

Some people have been seeking or snapping up small molecule drugs and gimmuneg lobulobulin to treat COVID-19, seeing them as wonder drugs, but Li pointed out that many of these drugs are only useful for specific groups with very strict conditions for usage.

"For example, Pfizer's COVID-19 treatment drug Paxlovid can play its best role in patients who take it within five days of onset. But trials have found that it has side effects such as taste disturbances and diarrhea. Ritonavir interacts with daily medications in patients with underlying diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and cardiac disease," Li explained.

The COVID-19 infection curve has already peaked in several major Chinese cities such as Beijing, but the number of severe cases is still high. Hospitals nationwide are making strenuous efforts to make up for shortages of hospital staff, upgrading their capacity and expanding medical resources in order to pull through the outbreak wave in an orderly and safe manner.