Gauden Galea used to run his own private medical practice in his hometown Żebbuġ. But these days, he is coordinating the World Health Organisation's efforts to contain the new coronavirus in China. 

It has been 40 days since the reported outbreak of a new strain of the virus emerged in a seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, crossing from animal to human transmission in the space of a few days.

Those 40 days have “probably been the busiest days of my life”, the health professional said, admitting to a lack of sleep.

Hundreds have died, thousands have been infected and hundreds of thousands have been quarantined under observation in China.

“Millions of Chinese civil servants have been counting the cases. This number of people traced and having their temperatures taken twice a day is just under the population of Malta,” Dr Galea said.

We reach out to countries to help them prepare. We coordinate with partners on lab testing and research

Speaking from Beijing over the weekend, he said he and his team are involved in a number of projects focused on containing and fighting the spread of the virus and on mitigating its impact on health and the health system.

Dr Galea’s daily tasks include everything from updating the numbers of confirmed cases to keeping an eye on the developments from WHO’s briefings in Geneva and from coverage of the virus in the international media and on Chinese social media.

The team is also engaged in a variety of outreach tasks. These include monitoring and describing trends in the epidemic to professional colleagues and briefing the 24 UN agencies and the diplomatic missions in Beijing.

They corroborate WHO’s data with the Chinese National Health Commission and reach out with risk communications on Chinese media.

A normally busy street near the WHO office in Beijing during the extended holiday. Photo: Gauden Galea

“Our Weibo social media account has grown from 900,000 followers to two million in the space of a month,” Dr Galea noted.

“Today is normally the Lantern Festival, the end of Chinese New Year. It would normally have been a big feast.

“Instead, we were around a desk answering questions from the public. We’d be asked: how do I protect myself when the holidays end? How do I use a mask correctly?”

“We are working with international experts to better understand the virus. Together with our colleagues across the three levels of the organisation, we reach out to countries to help them prepare. We coordinate with partners on important issues like lab testing and research.”

Who is Gauden Galea?

The 59-year-old doctor said that his past work in the Maltese public health service gave him a strong background for the health emergency that is currently unfolding.

Since his graduation from medical school in 1984, Dr Galea was involved in both public health practice and his own general practice in his home village of Żebbuġ.

Between 1986 and 1998, he helped create public health campaigns and medical education courses for medical students. In the transition between the 1980s and 1990s, Dr Galea worked with Malta’s Health Education Unit and later Health Promotion Department, devising public campaigns responding to the emergence of AIDS and HIV.

That was a critical time for HIV, he recalled, given that there were still no treatments for the illness, as well as lack of vaccines, only the promotion of measures like safe sex and needle exchange schemes.

“These cases align with the work we’re doing now only on a vastly larger scale in China. There is currently no vaccine or treatment,” he said.

Dr Galea later served as executive director of the Institute of Healthcare which later became the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Malta.

The last decade of his career has been spent with WHO in postings from Fiji to Switzerland, before becoming the representative to China in April 2018.

As China continues to struggle to contain the spread of the new virus, Dr Galea may be facing the biggest challenge of his life.

Globally, almost 40,000 people have been confirmed as suffering from the symptoms of fever, coughs and respiratory problems like shortness of breath, more commonly associated with colds and flu.

Around 2,000 cases have been “marked as cured” and discharged, while 772 people have died from the virus, only one of them outside China, Dr Galea said on Saturday.