Getting calls at all hours of the day is not unusual for Liu Jie, the Community Mobilization Officer in the UNAIDS Country Office in China. Because of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, the whole office has been active in helping people living with HIV to continue to access treatment, especially in Hubei Province, where the pandemic was first reported. Recently, Ms Liu was surprised when she had a call from Poland.
"A Chinese man introduced himself, saying he is stranded and will run out of HIV medicine in two days,” Ms Liu said.
With travel restrictions closing down more and more countries, the man could neither return home nor access medicine. Not knowing what to do, he reached out to a Chinese community-based organization, the Birch Forest National Alliance, and through them contacted UNAIDS in Beijing, she explained.
He, like countless other people abroad, was caught in limbo by the fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak. Days earlier, the UNAIDS Country Office in China had helped another Chinese person living with HIV access medicine while stuck in Angola. In both cases, colleagues in Beijing reached out to UNAIDS country offices and the Community Mobilization Team in Geneva, Switzerland. The UNAIDS Country Director for Angola reached out to the Angolan Network of AIDS Service Organisations and the person accessed medicine in no time.
For the case in Poland, Jacek Tyszko, a Polish native and part of the UNAIDS Community Mobilization Team, knew exactly what to do. “Because we have been in touch with regional networks of people living with HIV in central and eastern Europe, I made one call,” Mr Tyszko said.
Anna Marzec-Boguslawska, head of the National AIDS Center in Poland, quickly agreed to follow up. She has always been very responsive, which allows us to move quickly on the ground. Twenty-four hours later, Ms Liu received a photo of a man holding up a box of medicine in front of a grey building. Minutes later her phone rang.
“It was the same Chinese guy calling again from Poland,” she said. “He was crying with joy, saying he had his medicine and that was a picture of him just now.”
She added, “He kept saying how he could not believe that we made the impossible possible.”
The Director of the Birch Forest National Alliance, Bai Hua, also thanked UNAIDS. “This case really reflects that UNAIDS is rooted among the communities,” he said.
