In an editorial published Friday, famed medical journal The Lancet called for open collaboration to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and called efforts to scapegoat China "not constructive."

"When it comes to COVID-19, scapegoating China for the pandemic is not a constructive response," it read. 

Rest of the world can still learn from China 

China has largely controlled COVID-19, and the rest of the world can still learn from China's successes in bringing its outbreak under control, it said. 

"A country of 1·4 billion people and a size similar to Europe or the USA now reports only clusters of cases rather than widespread community transmission," it added.  

China's response shows the importance of domestic research and public health capacity, said the editorial. 

Chinese scientists were quickly able to identify the virus and shared genomic sequencing data internationally shortly after COVID-19 emerged, said the article. 

By the end of January, doctors from China had characterized the clinical features of patients with COVID-19, person-to-person transmission, genomic characteristics, and epidemiology, warning the world about the threat of COVID-19 with research papers published in The Lancet. 

China has also been at the forefront of vaccine research, with promising results of early trials of a recombinant adenovirus type-5-vectored COVID-19 vaccine developed in China published in The Lancet in May and July, read the article. 

(Cover image: A cinema staff is checking customers' health codes at the entrance in Kunming, Yunnan Province, southwest China, July 24,2020./VCG)

(With input from Xinhua)