China: COVID-19 also through the eyes

(To Antonio Vecchio)
18/03/20

As soon as the containment phase of the disease, celebrated last week with Xi Jinping's visit to Wuhan, has ended, China is capitalizing on its success and offering its help in terms of medical and health care (personal and material) and knowledge.

The official newspapers announce it triumphantly, from chinadaily.com.cn in its global Edition1, "President backs Italy's fight against COVID 19"; to the globaltimes.cn it reports2 with broad notes the presence of Chinese doctors in Iraq, "The goal of the visit of the Chinese expert team to Baghdad is to share the Chinese experience with their Iraqi counterparts".

The official news agency xinhuanet.com as we write also announces3 than China "Identifies with Italy's urgent concerns, and will send more medical expert to Italy and do its best to provide medical supplies and other assistance".

Describing a broad collaboration (300 doctors and paramedics are coming) which in the body of the article is also aimed at promoting "The construction of a Health Silk Road", issuing a sibylline warning to those who, even within us, are always opposed to close cooperation between the two countries.

This occurs in the days when Beijing is celebrating for the first time fewer COVID-19 cases than in other countries, caring more about the "return infections ", those caused by foreigners and Chinese emigrants who return to the country, now obliged to one collective quarantine, (not, as in the West, trust at your home) with expenses charged to the interested parties.

Meanwhile, on the scientific research side, Chinese researchers share new discoveries: some useful for speeding up the initial phase of diagnosis, others, on the other hand, in the prospect of a possible vaccine.

Among the first, China now “Offers doctors all over the world free access to one diagnostic tool equipped with artificial intelligence for early identification, by scanning the chest, of Covid-19 patients4".

The system Tianhe-1 of the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin is able to screen hundreds of images generated by computed tomography (CT) providing a diagnosis in about 10 seconds that allows, with an accuracy greater than 80%, to instantly separate the affected patients from common pneumonia from those with COVID-19.

Equipped with interface in English, which can be accessed via computer or smartphone, Tianhe-1 allows an excellent estimate of the probability that a person has contracted the virus, guiding the doctor in those areas of the lung that present signs indicative of his presence.

It also provides operational suggestions on the basis of previous experience and lessons learned from doctors who first came across the clinical situation under consideration.

The system is currently in use in 30 hospitals in Wuhan and in many cities in the Hubei region.

He is able to examine 300 CT images in ten seconds, compared to the 15 minutes it would take an expert doctor to do the same job, proving particularly useful in the growing phases of the epidemic curve.

It is suspected, in fact, that in the initial days of the disease in Wuhan, several thousand patients did not have access to treatment precisely because of the clogging of the hospitals.

For this reason too, China now wants to share Tianhe-1 with the rest of the world, which presents itself as an additional tool of that health diplomacy of which we reported two days ago on these pages (v.articolo).

Still on the research side, confirmation is received that COVID-19 attacks the body also by ocular route.

Beijing doctors would come to this conclusion, after a colleague of theirs, sent to Wuhan at the beginning of the emergency, was infected despite the fact that he always wore overalls and a protective mask.

In order to understand why, the researchers wet the eyes of two guinea pigs with a solution containing the virus, finding the positivity to the virus a few days later.

Further research then showed that the viral strain may have been absorbed by the conjunctiva, the layer that covers the eyeball and the inner part of the eyelids, and then travels through the tear duct to the upper part of the throat.

It means then that wearing a face mask is not enough to protect people from the virus.

Especially if, as some (always) Chinese studies seem to confirm, COVID-19 can survive in the air for some time.