Understanding the beginning of a pandemic: China’s response to the emergence of COVID-19

China had suffered the COVID-19 outbreak from the end of 2019, SARS-CoV-2 began to spread secretly within the community and in hospitals, causing numerous citizens to be infected without knowing it. After the official confirmation of COVID-19, hospital diagnosis and treatment systems were under great pressure, and medical supplies were scarce. Then the pandemic experienced an explosive growth and quickly peaked. In order to respond to the challenge, the Chinese government quickly built hospitals, adjusted the diagnosis and treatment systems, deployed medical staff to support areas affected by the epidemic, isolated and treated infected patients as much as possible, reminded citizens to use good protection, and controlled the epidemic step-by-step. In this paper, we used official published data and medical literature about the transmission of COVID-19 as well as prevention and control guidelines issued by the Chinese government and hospitals, adopted a multi-dimensional analysis framework, divided the outbreak into three phases: (1) “blind man touching the elephant” phase, (2) “opening Pandora’s box” phase, (3) “whole offensive and whole defensive tactics” phase. This was done to describe the development of and response to the pandemic. This paper suggested that when dealing with similar outbreaks in the future, we should do a better job of providing protective guidance and material reserves in advance, strengthen the emergency response capacity of medical institutions, and aim to share this information with the public medical systems of other countries which also face severe tests.