Police officers salute as a medical worker from outside Wuhan arrives at the Wuhan railway station, March 17, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Stringer.
The following is an unedited extract from The Coronavirus (2020).
On 24 February 2020, Dr Yingchun Zeng, from the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, and Dr Yan Zhen, from Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou, published an article in The Lancet. When the outbreak started, The Lancet provided free access to the most accurate, reliable and scientifically insightful research about COVID-19. The article published by Dr Yingchun and Dr Yan was a letter of correspondence; it was not a research study and can be described only as a cry for help. In our combined five decades of reading The Lancet, we have never seen an article like it.
Chinese medical workers were using a medical journal to get a desperate message past the Chinese censors. For the first time in the history of The Lancet, doctors used the medical journal as social media to contact their colleagues for help. They wrote, “The conditions and environment here in Wuhan are more difficult and extreme than we could ever have imagined.”
The Lancet letter described shortages of protective equipment, such as N95 respirators, face shields, goggles, gowns and gloves. Healthcare workers wore the same equipment for prolonged periods, resulting in painful physical injuries. “As a result of wearing an N95 respirator for extended periods of time and layers of protective equipment, some nurses now have pressure ulcers on their ears and forehead … nurses’ mouths are covered in blisters … several of our colleagues’ hands are covered in painful rashes … In order to save energy and the time it takes to put on and take off protective clothing, we avoid eating and drinking for two hours before entering the isolation ward. Some nurses have fainted due to hypoglycaemia and hypoxia.”
Dr Swapneil Parikh, Maherra Desai and Dr Rajesh Parikh
Penguin, 2020
Dr Yingchun and Dr Yan ended their letter wishing the people of the world good health. “We hope the COVID-19 epidemic will end soon, and that people worldwide will remain in good health.” Two days later, The Lancet reported that the authors reached out to them claiming that they fabricated their letter. The Lancet had to retract their letter. Disturbingly, both of them have disappeared. Enquires to their workplaces were met with replies saying no one by that name had ever worked there.
In a video that went viral on social media, a woman chases a funeral van. Her heart-wrenching cries pierce her hazmat suit, her grief clear although her face is not. Inside the van lies the body of Dr Liu Zhiming, a respected neurosurgeon and director of Wuhan’s Wuchang Hospital, who led the hospital’s response to the outbreak. Chasing the van was his wife, nurse Cai Liping. Another video told the story of Dr Peng Yinhua. He had delayed his wedding to fight the outbreak. On 20 February, at just twenty-nine years of age, he died of COVID-19.
At the time of publishing, over 3,300 health workers in China have been infected and there have been at least eighteen deaths. Some have died because of cardiac arrest and exhaustion due to overwork and fatigue. Chinese authorities used their stories as state-sponsored propaganda. The government used the very social media it was censoring to disseminate propaganda videos of martyred medical workers.
Social media users fought back. “Stop this type of propaganda! Stop putting unprotected medical workers on the front line,” one user wrote. Another commented, “These reports are just propaganda … They’re humiliating these nurses, but they present it as if they are making a sacrifice.” While the state propaganda machine continued to exploit these tragedies, a front-line nurse, Long Qiaoling, posted a poem. An excerpt reads:
The slogans are
yours The praise is
yours
The propaganda, the model workers, all are
yours I am just fulfilling my duties
Acting on a healer’s conscience
Some groups put their archives on GitHub, a site where coders can post and share their code. Coders were posting messages on GitHub embedded in code to bypass Chinese censors. Other groups are sharing screenshots of censored posts on Telegram channels. China experts are shocked at the sudden outpouring of anger against Chinese leaders and demands for freedom of speech. Social media is arguably the most powerful tool for change, and because of its users, to quote Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin'”.