Scientific research helps prevent COVID-19

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Quang Thai – Photo: NVCC

It is expected that the winning work will be announced and awarded this May, on the occasion of Vietnam Science and Technology Day.

Science helps to cope in times of danger

At this point, maybe we are all “accustomed” to the disease COVID-19, the disease caused by the corona virus. But at the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 (originally known as acute pneumonia caused by new strain of corona virus) was the fear of many people, “what if” they were infected, then had to be isolated and traced. .. It was in those early days that Dr. Thai’s team embarked on research.

“The important thing when fighting the epidemic is knowing the spreading characteristics of the virus: how it is transmitted, what are the symptoms of the disease… In the early stages, we just think that the infected person has a fever but not enough information. There are people who have no symptoms, if only screening cases through body temperature checks like in the beginning, they sometimes “survive” all cases”, Dr. Thai shared with Tuoi Tre reporter.

At that time, COVID-19 was a very new disease, the world also had very little information about the disease, the original theory was that this was an animal-to-human disease, but difficult to spread from person to person.

Starting the research, with data on over 200 cases recorded in the first 100 days of COVID-19 appearing in Vietnam, Dr. Thai and his colleagues drew many important conclusions: COVID-19 spreads easily Person-to-person transmission, transmission from the time F0 is asymptomatic, and the coefficient of transmission are very much related to the anti-epidemic strategy.

In Vietnam at that time, tracing and isolating each case was applied, so the infection coefficient was just over 1, while the world was from 2.1 to 6.

If the infection coefficient is less than 1, the epidemic will soon end, if the coefficient is equal to 1, the epidemic is still there but can be “circled”, and the higher the coefficient, the more contagious the epidemic. At that time, each country had its own anti-epidemic view, some places declared “living with the epidemic” and floating, so it spread quite widely.

This view causes the number of cases to increase rapidly, on the one hand, the rate of natural immunity also increases rapidly, but without a vaccine, there are not many drugs to treat and the resources of the health system are limited. can resist.

Don’t miss any which case?

And to have conclusions in the first 100 days, Dr. Thai and his colleagues did not miss any cases in these 100 days, even “tracing back” to find “traces” such as when symptoms started. , test date, infect who…

Lots of retrospectives to analyze case-by-case information. The fact that from the end of April 2020, the epidemic was stable until July (until the epidemic broke out in Da Nang), proving that Vietnam’s strategy in the first days was very reasonable.

And taking that “opportunity”, Dr. Thai and his colleagues completed the research and submitted it to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases – the world’s leading journal on infectious diseases. On June 2, 2020, it was approved for publication and on August 27, 2020, it was published after the review process.

The study was used as evidence of the anti-epidemic results at that time in Vietnam, cited many times in international media channels. The results of the study have also been previously sent to the National Epidemic Prevention and Control Steering Committee, providing evidence and contributing a voice to policy making on COVID-19 prevention in Vietnam.

These days, when returning at the time of the first 100 days of anti-epidemic, Dr. Thai said the research results have contributed to changing the strategy of screening cases at the airport, sharing Vietnam’s experience with the world. . “The results of asymptomatic transmission have been used by the World Health Organization and the US CDC to recommend general epidemic control measures,” said Dr. Thai.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pham Quang Thai, 46 years old, is the deputy head of the infectious disease control department of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology. Dr. Thai has also joined the Rapid Response Team to investigate and respond to many epidemics in the country from 2000 to present. From March 2020, Dr. Thai joined the Quick Response Information Team under the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control.