Surgeon wants national day to mark hardship of virus

Chen Jingyu, one of China's top lung transplant surgeons, received a message on Wednesday informing him that Italian doctors had performed Europe's first double lung transplant on a COVID-19 patient.

The message from an Italian doctor said the 18-year-old patient had pulmonary fibrosis caused by the novel coronavirus.

Chen knows the surgical procedure well. On Feb 29, he performed China's first double lung transplant operation on a novel coronavirus patient at a hospital in Wuxi, Jiangsu province.

Chen said he was happy to hear the news of the successful operation in Europe and wanted to share his own experience with other doctors.

He has suggested making Jan 23, the day that Wuhan, Hubei province, was locked down to contain the spread of the virus, National Public Health Day. "It would be an extraordinary day for China to remember, and for the common people to improve public health awareness," said Chen, a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress.

"We must learn from this pandemic and prevent such diseases from spreading widely in the future."

Chen said China should make every effort to further improve the public health system and cited the global growth in the number of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19 and severe acute respiratory syndrome, as a major challenge.

"I believe that people may have to live with the novel coronavirus and more infectious diseases may also appear in the future," he said. "A more effective public health system will be essential to contain those diseases."

In March, Chen suggested a lung transplant team be temporarily established in Wuhan, the Chinese city hit hardest by the virus, to treat COVID-19 patients with severe lung damage.

In April, his suggestion was taken up, and a team of lung transplant experts was sent to Wuhan. Chen was appointed head of the team, and the China Organ Transplantation Development Foundation donated funds to help cover the costs.

"We were the last hope for those patients," Chen said.

At his hospital in Jiangsu, Chen's patients are placed on an ECMO machine, which oxygenates and pumps the patient's blood, for two to three weeks before having their lung transplants.

However, some severely ill patients in Wuhan had been on ECMO or ventilators for more than two months.

"Local hospitals had tried hard to save their lives," Chen said. "We performed four lung transplant surgeries for patients who were infected with the virus. It shows persistence and a respect for life."

Chen did his transplant training in Canada, and said the well-funded Canadian medical system treated all patients regardless of the cost. "Now I've witnessed the same situation happening in China," he said.

Chen said the average cost of treating a lung transplant patient is 600,000($84,000) to 700,000 yuan. "We really did everything we could to save people's lives," he said.

As an NPC deputy for 13 years, Chen has made more than 50 suggestions at plenary meetings. Some of them have been taken up, including the establishment of a system to ensure the fast and safe transfer of donated human organs.

Chen said even though he is a thoracic surgeon, he considers himself an ordinary person. "Working as a deputy enables me to act as a bridge between the public, medical workers and the government," he said.