COVID-19 and TCM: How Chinese medicine makes scientific inroads

In its latest move, Beijing health authorities have included Chinese medicine into the treatment plan for COVID-19 patients, as the city is going through a resurgence of the novel coronavirus after a 56-day streak of no locally transmitted cases.

With the emergence of new clusters of cases linked to the Xinfadi wholesale market – a hub supplying some 80 percent of food for the city's residents – Beijing quickly reacted with a series of policy measures ranging from partial lockdown to expansion of testing to the revision of treating the disease with Chinese herbal medicine.

Manufacturers of Chinese patent drugs based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM, have been working non-stop to produce much-needed drugs. One of them is Yiling Pharmaceutical, the manufacturer of Lianhua Qingwen – one of the three Chinese medicines that have proven effective in curbing the virus following clinical trials.

"Since early February, we've halted the production of other products and focused all our capacity on producing Lianhua Qingwen," said Zhang Zhiguang, general manager of Yiling Pharmaceutical Beijing. In early May, the manufacturing bases at Yiling's Shijiazhuang headquarters and its Beijing branch could produce some 53 million capsules and 2 million granules each day, Zhang told CGTN.

The demand for Lianhua Qingwen has soared since Wuhan started converting public facilities into temporary hospitals in the wake of a spiraling rise of confirmed and suspected cases.

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