Dear all my distinguished professors,
I am writing to ask your favour of supporting the decision made by the college of public health, National Taiwan University: postpone our April meeting “Humanity on Planetary Health originally planned on 16-17th April until 23th and 24th June 2020. I apologize for being unable to send our formal letter regarding the delayed schedule at earlier date due to many serious considerations in response to to COVID-19 infected pneumonia.
Since a large-scale outbreak of 2019-nCOV renamed as COVID-19 by WHO lately in Jan I have been involved in evaluation of the consequences of this unexpected new global epidemics. The consequences in Asia are very serious and consequential. The outbreaks have been spread from Wu-Han, the capital city of Hu-Bei, to other areas of China. However, after the strict isolation and quarantine service regulated by China the epidemics have subsided last week in Chia. It has raised a hope for the end of large epidemics by the end of March. That’s why I am a bit hesitant to make a final decision to delay our meeting. However, it seems the epidemics has shifted from China to other neighbourhood countries including Japan, Korea, Singapore, Honkong, and Thailand all of which have epidemics in the community currently. Please be aware of travelling to these areas with high alarming infected zone. It is predicted that all the Asian countries may be overwhelmed by epidemics in the next two months.
However, in spite of the delayed schedule, I have already told several good colleagues about an idea of calling a distance video April meeting on 16-17th as planned originally.
I hope we can invite 10 experts like all of VIPs to talk about “Health Humanity on COVID-19 n-Cov”. There are many aspects of the epidemics of COVID-19 that are worthy of being discussed. These include history, ethics, human right, equity, health, psychological aspect, and so on as originally planned. We may publish one special issue in the Journal or write one monograph for this important topic. You can see there are many issues derived from different types of human to human infection like cruise ship ending up a large outbreak and what is the point when viewed from human right and ethics ? (see the enclosed PPT proposed by me)
We will also invite our Asian research people and professors to join with our distance video meeting. I have already consulted with Ping-Chen and Luiz. Both are very positive about this idea.
Your feedback and suggestions are also the most welcome. We will start to work with all of you about the details of logistics after the schedule is delayed. It is very important to first conform whether June 23-24 is okay for you.
I will put the delayed schedule on news of website and will also put the updated materials on the news of epidemics of COVID-19 for your reference.
Best Wish
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Vice Dean, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University |
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Prof. Hsiu-Hsi Chen |
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