High praise for young volunteers in Jiading

About 8,000 young volunteers mobilized by the Jiading Youth League Committee to support novel coronavirus prevention work formed the backbone of the district’s volunteer efforts.

As the situation changed, prevention and control of imported COVID-19 cases became a priority for Shanghai.

As of March 17, Zhang Bingyang and Xu Yan, staff at the Jiangqiao Community Health Service Center, became the first group of staff members responsible for collecting swabs for people in the temporary quarantine center.

During the outbreak, collecting swabs was considered to be one of the operations with a high risk of infection.

If the subject has been infected with the virus, sneezing, retching, coughing and other reactions caused in the collection process will produce droplets with the virus, greatly increasing the risk of infection.

Zhang and Xu took extreme care when repeating the high-risk operation dozens of times.

At 5am every day, they got up and started to prepare for the sampling work. One prepared the sampling tubes while the other prepared protective equipment.

After getting “fully armed,” they checked the number of sampling tubes at around 6:30am. They pushed the trolley carrying sampling tools and started their daily tasks.

In order to avoid cross infection, they needed to change gloves and disinfect protective equipment after each sample was taken.

“There were several times when the sampled people had serious rhinitis. Just after the cotton swab was put into their noses, they couldn’t help sneezing. The distance between us was 20cm, and the droplets directly splashed on my protective mask,” said Zhang.

But the two volunteers managed to stay calm and supported each other.