By Wen Yujie and Guo Chen

CHONGQING, May 20 -- Seven members of the 6th Chinese military medical expert team to Ethiopia were released from quarantine in Chongqing on May 18, after returning home from overseas medical aid mission. The remaining two members of the team will return to China after completing the work handover before the end of this month.

The nine members of the team are mainly from the Southwest Hospital of the PLA Army Medical University (AMU), specializing in neurosurgery, maxillofacial surgery, cardiovascular surgery, critical care, etc. They arrived in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, in January 2020 and engaged in clinical treatment, personnel training and technical instruction and assistance in the General Hospital of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF).

The team members encountered the COVID-19 pandemic during their stay in Ethiopia. In the case of supplies shortage, they donated more than 30,000 pieces of anti-pandemic materials, provided more than 5,000 times of consultations on pandemic prevention and control, as well as more than 900 boxes of urgently needed medicines. And totally, they performed more than 20 emergency surgeries.

They also helped with the establishment of the Ethiopian military’s first self-supporting COVID-19 testing laboratory and the first isolation treatment center in the ENDF’s General Hospital.

When the hospital began to receive confirmed COVID-19 patients, the Chinese military medical experts team participated in the whole process of diagnosis and treatment of more than 500 patients, and ensured zero occurance of nosocomial infection.