SAHZU COVID-19 experience was shared with 13 Latin America countries on May 8 via videoconferencing. Argentine Health Minister Ginés González García, Vice Minister Alejandro Costa, Lead Technical Coordinator at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Mexico Victor Villalobos, joined the webinar, together with over 2300 audience from 187 medical institutes in 13 LATAM countries.

In his opening remarks for the webinar, Argentina Health Minister Ginés González García said that this sharing is helpful for them in that Argentina is still on the frontier of the pandemic, although its efforts are paying off with the current total 5000 cases.

The webinar went on for one and a half hour. SAHZU President Prof. WANG Jian’an talked about SAHZU’s strategy in response to the initial outbreak in China, like arranging staff pipeline to support the fever clinic and isolation wards, deploying personal protective equipment, and triaging patients. LATAM colleagues also expressed their eagerness to learn from China’s COVID-19 experience by asking questions concerning personal protective gears, vaccine development, virus spread model etc.

Prof. WANG emphasized the importance of hospital management throughout the webinar. He considers it as the key to the pandemic, even more critical than the treatment of the disease itself, because “when the overall response strategy of a hospital is well-prepared, the treatment of individual patients will become less tough".

SAHZU has formed an effective emergency response system, covering medical training, resource arrangement, information coordination, hospital infection control etc., which yielded proud outcomes of zero infection of both medical staff and patients due to the COVID-19 and zero misdiagnosis of this novel virus. Now, as the pandemic is ebbing away in China, SAHZU has almost returned to its normal services.

Virus knows no boundary or race. SAHZU is willing to collaborate with the world to protect the global health.