With a few clicks on a laptop and several taps to fill in additional information, a fever clinic doctor at Yiwu Central Hospital in Zhejiang province can now report an infectious disease case to disease control agencies for verification and handling.

"This digital system has replaced the conventional method of manually filling out infectious disease report cards, which was time-consuming and prone to errors caused by illegible handwriting," said Wang Binlu, a public health worker at the hospital.

The same streamlined procedure has also been extended to the submission of positive testing samples to more advanced laboratories for retesting.

"In the past, we had to fill out paperwork and make phone calls to complete the process. Now it's much faster and more efficient," she added.

The application of such systems in Yiwu offers a window into a national push to build intelligent, multi-trigger surveillance and early warning systems for infectious diseases to detect potential outbreaks more accurately and promptly.

Fending off the risk of infectious diseases carries particular significance in Yiwu, home to the world's largest wholesale market for small manufactured goods, where business people from around the world gather and trade.

"Yiwu has a registered household population of about 900,000, but a permanent resident population of about 3.4 million, meaning that a large portion of the city's population consists of migrant workers and foreign businessmen," said Jiang Jun, director of the city's disease control and prevention center.

Despite an increase in inbound travelers in recent years, the city has not reported major local transmission of infectious diseases triggered by imported cases, she said.

Zhu Liebo, deputy director of the center, said all nine secondary or higher-level hospitals across the city and 14 community healthcare centers have been equipped with a national early warning software that replaces manual reporting and integrates syndromic data as well as other information from schools and elderly care homes for analytics to detect early signs.

"This year, through surveillance of telltale symptoms and clusters of suspected cases, we effectively handled 344 emerging incidents as of late July and managed to ensure that outbreaks are identified and intervened in at an early stage," he said.

Despite the fact that high temperature and humidity, as well as heavy rainfall this summer, have amplified the risk of mosquito-borne diseases, the city reported no local transmission of such diseases triggered by imported cases, he added.

Zhu said all major hospitals across the city are now capable of carrying out nucleic acid testing for dengue fever and chikungunya fever, while epidemiological investigation information can be quickly transferred along with samples to CDC agencies and hospitals with testing capacity through an online coordination system.

The rate of confirmed diagnosis at the initial consultation for mosquito-borne infectious diseases has reached 97.3 percent, a year-on-year increase of 10.52 percentage points, and response teams are typically activated and ready to work within 30 minutes.

According to the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) for disease control released by the National Disease Control and Prevention Administration and six other government departments in July, efforts will be made to further upgrade national and provincial infectious-disease monitoring and emergency command platforms, enhance big data integration and management capabilities, and unify information systems while deepening their connectivity.