On 14th March 2020, Ambassador Li Minggang attended the virtual meeting on exchanging experience in combating COVID-19 epidemic between health experts from Shanghai, China and officials from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Health. Organized by Shanghai Municipal Foreign Affairs Office (Shanghai FAO) and facilitated by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, Kuwait,the meetingwas attended by BeiZhaojian, deputy director-general of Shanghai FAO, Sun Xiadong, Deputy Director General of Shanghai Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Shen Yinzhong, Director of Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center and Shen Weizhe, Section Chief of Foreign Affairs of Shanghai Municipal Health Commission. Participants from the Kuwaiti counterparts included Dr. Buthaina Al-Mudhaf, Assistant Undersecretary for Public Health Affairs of the Ministry of Health (MoH), officials from MoH’s Departments of Public Health, International Cooperation and Communicable Disease Control, and frontline medical staff.
In his remarks, Ambassador Li indicated that the COVID-19 epidemic had become a huge challenge for the globe and all humanity. Since the emergence of COVID-19, China and Kuwait had supported each other and maintained close communication and collaboration in epidemic response, which reflects the strategic friendship between the two countries. This virtual meeting would serve as a unique opportunity for both sides to exchange and jointly work on epidemic control, and it was believed that China’s experience in this regard would provide useful reference to Kuwait.
During the meeting, Prof. Sun Xiaodong and Prof. Shen Yinzhong gave detailed responses to six aspectsof the inquiries that were the top concerns of their Kuwaiti counterparts, includingCOVID-19 virology, examination and diagnosis, community-based epidemic prevention, isolation and quarantine measures, epidemiology, epidemic prevention and control measures. Other questions regarding drug development, Chinese traditional medicine treatment, criteria of hospital discharge and management approach for asymptomatic patients were also answeredfollowing discussions.
Dr. Buthaina Al-Mudhaf, Kuwaiti MoH’s Assistant Undersecretary for Public Health Affairs, lauded China’s successful experience in COVID-19 response, and thanked health specialists from Shanghai for the professional answers and constructive recommendations. Affirming that this virtual meeting had provided positive guidance to Kuwait for COVID-19 response, she said that the Kuwaiti side would learn from it in earnest,and looked forward to strengthening exchange and cooperation with China in fighting COVID-19.