Two of China’s front-line COVID-19 doctors to discuss virus in May 5 webinar

Two health experts who have been on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 in China will speak during a Northwestern University webinar Tuesday, May 5, to discuss clinical features and predictors of COVID-19 infection outcomes, as well as the role of public health in COVID-19 pandemics in large cities.

The one-hour webinar, hosted by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Institute for Global Health, will begin at 8 a.m. (CT). Media interested in attending the webinar should e-mail Kristin Samuelson at ksamuelson@northwestern.edu to register and receive a link to join the talk. Visit this site for more information on the webinar. 

Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health, will facilitate the discussion with panelists Dr. Xin Zheng, professor and director of the department of infectious diseases at the Wuhan Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College and Huazhong University of Science, and Dr. Fan Wu, deputy dean of the Shanghai Medical School, deputy director-general of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission and former director-general of the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

The webinar is co-sponsored by Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, departments of preventive medicine and infectious diseases and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern.

More about the panelists:

Dr. Zheng is the head of the COVID-19 expert team in her hospital and supervises the isolation wards of COVID-19 patients. She is an internationally recognized clinical expert in COVID-19 and has been sharing her experience with peers in Germany, Spain, Italy and other U.S. institutes. She recently engaged in a joint workshop with Johns Hopkins. In Tuesday’s webinar, Dr. Zheng will share her experience in categorizing COVID-19 patients based on the severity and potential development of their symptoms.

Dr. Wu serves as an expert for the Shanghai municipal group overseeing control and prevention of COVID-19, a member of the committee of Shanghai science and technology research group and a member of the China-World Health Organization Joint Mission on COVID-19. She led the Shanghai CDC team to implement public health security for large-scale activities and mass gatherings, such as the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and respond to influenza H1N1, avian influenza H7N9 and other public health emergencies.

Dr. Murphy is director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases and the John Philip Phair Professor of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He has closely followed the COVID-19 pandemic since it first originated and was in China during the early part of the outbreak.