MPC Member Publications

This database contains a listing of population studies publications written by MPC Members. Anyone can add a publication by an MPC student, faculty, or staff member to this database; new citations will be reviewed and approved by MPC administrators.

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Title: System Shock: Nonlocal Grassroots Response to COVID-19 at Ground Zero, Wuhan

Citation Type: Journal Article

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Abstract: days before the Chinese New Year of the Rat (the new start in the twelve-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac), the central government of China announced the lockdown of Wuhan, a city with over eleven million people, due to the outbreak of COVID-19. It was an unprecedented crisis that neither the government nor the society had ever encountered. COVID-19 patients flocked to hospitals and soon discovered that there was a dearth of available beds. Essential community services were cut off, leaving vulnerable populations-the elderly, pregnant women, people with chronic diseases-desperately seeking support. The shortage of medical supplies was so serious that medical workers had to bypass the government and send out individual pleas for donations. 1 Indeed, the government's responses to COVID-19 in the first few weeks were inadequate; the emergency plan developed by the government to deal with "normal" disasters was simply insufficient for such a sweeping crisis. When COVID-19 hit Wuhan, a city with no prior experiences of a pandemic, the whole society went into system shock. 2 Wuhan being the global ground zero for COVID-19, citizens did not know how dangerous and widespread the virus would turn out to be. The Chinese government was still collecting information in order to coordinate public health resources. Businesses were dealing with the beginning impacts of a looming economic shutdown. Nonprofits were trying to figure out how they could help-a tough order, given that they could not operate their normal disaster relief efforts on the ground. For two to three weeks after the emergency lockdown, things in Wuhan were chaotic. Heartbreaking stories broke on Chinese social media about frontline medical workers lacking medical supplies and unattended family members dying due to lack of care. Before February 21, 2020, when all the Fangcang shelter hospitals (hospitals built for COVID-19 patients) came into use, the situation was desperate. 3

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Authors: Cheng, Yuan; Wang, Xiaoyun; Zhang, Xueshan

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