by Fang Fang
It’s day 46 of the quarantine. At this stage in the outbreak there is an increasing amount of positive news coming out. Some districts are beginning to start incrementally easing the quarantine orders; I’ve also been hearing some occasional rumors that people might be getting back to work soon. One friend told me that the airport was already preparing to resume flights. This news is both encouraging and frightening at the same time. If this is all true, then the city should be opening back up soon. My fellow Wuhanese, I think the light of day is almost here?
The messages I’m getting from my doctor friends are also positive. It has now been two days since we entered this new low-infection-rate stage, and the numbers of patients are clearly dropping. The temporary hospitals have begun to successively shut down, and the largest one that was set up at the Wuhan Keting Expo area just announced today that they are shutting down, too. New patients can now all be directly admitted to regular hospitals for treatment. Some hospitals have gotten their outpatient clinics back up and running again. In this fight to control the spread of the coronavirus, we are currently clearing the battlefield; the day we can start over again is now in sight. But right now we still have over 5,000 patients with serious symptoms, and more than 17,000 people are still hospitalized. Thanks to the coordination of a team of leading medical specialists, doctors are now able to share their experiences treating the coronavirus and improve on standard treatment methods, which has helped to ensure that all patients receive the best care possible. My friend’s optimism makes me believe that it won’t be too long before these final 17,000 patients will be discharged.
Actually, we can now see that the last stages of this battle against the coronavirus and our own lives are all gradually becoming more and more orderly. Most community service workers have been quite meticulous, and everyone has a very good attitude. One of my colleagues is always showing us pictures of community workers helping local residents with all kinds of tasks; he said that they are amazing, even helping residents with shopping. To win the people’s approval like that, they must be doing a really good job. You should know that those Wuhan nüjiang can be really hard to please, and sometimes really fierce! To be fair, those community workers who volunteer to go out to these smaller communities really have a tough job; they basically end up doing all kinds of odd jobs; they have to do a little bit of everything. This is especially the case in those traditional old neighborhoods where the buildings have no elevators; they end up lugging groceries up many flights of stairs, teaching elderly residents how to use cellphones, and in some cases helping residents who don’t even have cellphones make phone calls. There are all kinds of people living together in this city. There is no shortage of people who love to bicker; they are very stubborn and won’t think twice about getting in a real fight. Dealing with these types of people makes community service particularly challenging. The fact that most Wuhan people have been able to make it this far and are able to still hold on is, in large part, due to the hard work of those community workers.
Some of my colleagues at the Hubei Writers Association are starting to get back to work. Changjiang Literature and Art Magazine plans to get its next issue out on time, which is something that cannot be done if everyone just stays home. Originally I was supposed to submit a novella to them after the Lunar New Year, but I ended up eating my words. Reporters keep asking me the same question about what I’m most looking forward to doing once the city reopens. My response: I want to take a good rest; and then I want to finish that novella. If I don’t take care of those lingering debts, I’ll probably end up ostracized from all my friends!
The outbreak is already easing up here, yet the tragedies continue. The Xinjia Express Hotel in Quanzhou where people were being housed under quarantine just collapsed. My classmate just sent a message to our chat group; the collapse occurred this evening just after 6:00 p.m. and 71 people were trapped inside. As of 4:00 p.m. firefighters on scene had already rescued 48 people, 10 of whom have already died and the other 38 were taken to the hospital for treatment. There should be another 23 people still trapped inside. I’m so anxious! A lot of these people who were quarantined were from Hubei. Somehow they escaped from the grip of the coronavirus, yet couldn’t escape from this unsafe building. Perhaps this qualifies as yet another secondary disaster?
Today I saw an interview in Caijing with the Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-Yung.11 Dr. Yuen was a member of the third team of specialists that came to Wuhan. During this outbreak he was appointed as a specialist to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 task force, and he is also a member of the Advisory Council for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Some of the information he revealed to the reporter in this interview was quite shocking.
Dr. Yuen stated: “I want to tell you the truth; the places we visited in Wuhan were likely all ‘model hospitals.’ They answered all the questions we asked, but it felt like their answers were all prerehearsed. But Zhong Nanshan was particularly sharp; he kept repeatedly asking them questions like: ‘Are you sure there weren’t any?’ ‘Are you positive there aren’t any more cases of infection?’ ‘Is the number of cases you reported really accurate?’ But their answer was always: ‘We are still testing. That’s because the Hubei Center for Disease Control didn’t receive test kits from the central government until January 16.’ After repeated questioning, they finally told us that: ‘It seems that one patient being treated in the department of neurosurgery infected 14 medical practitioners.’ Then they added: ‘But none of those medical workers have been officially diagnosed yet.’ The reporter from Caijing was really good; he followed up by asking: ‘So just who does “they” refer to? When you conducted your investigations at Wuhan Hospital, who were the primary people you met with?’ Yuen Kwok-Yung responded: ‘We met with people from the Wuhan Health Organization, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, representatives from local Wuhan hospitals, and the Hubei Health Organization.’ The reporter pressed him further: ‘At the time did you suspect that any of them were concealing the facts?’ Dr. Yuen responded, ‘During lunch I saw the Vice Mayor sitting next to Zhong Nanshan and he looked terrible. Judging from the stern look on his face, I’m sure that they already knew at that time that something really bad was happening. After all, we were already the third team of specialists to visit Wuhan. I believe that even if there had been things they were concealing, by that point there was already nothing left to hide. Yet they kept emphasizing the fact that a shipment of test kits had only just arrived in Wuhan so they hadn’t yet had enough time to conduct tests and confirm cases.’”
Now that we have some leads, we need to keep investigating! If we keep asking the right questions, we will eventually get to the cause. All of us want to know why there was a need to conceal such an important thing from the public.
It was only thanks to Zhong Nanshan’s sharp and stern questions that we were able to learn that human-to-human contact was, in fact, possible with this virus. It was only then that the people of Wuhan quickly awakened from their ignorance. Otherwise, had they continued to conceal the facts for much longer, it is hard to imagine just how much worse things would have gotten. Of the more than ten million Wuhan residents, how many would have survived?
Right now the questions we want to ask are: (1) Do we want to investigate all the people that Dr. Yuen Kwok-Yung mentioned? How far do we want to take this investigation? And (2) The two earlier groups of specialists who visited must have clearly seen how serious this was, so why didn’t they pursue their questioning with the same rigor and aggressiveness as Dr. Zhong Nanshan? During the course of his interview Dr. Yuen, at one point, uttered the following words: “Our scientists should know better than to ever overlook the value of soft intelligence.”
March 9, 2020
If someone has to take the blame and resign, let’s start with the secretary and director of Central Hospital.
The downpour was quite heavy last night and this morning it continues. In my mind, I always think of spring rain
as being gentle and silent, perhaps even a little romantic, but today it is just flooding down from the sky; I suppose I’ll have to keep the lights on inside all day today.
From the tone of my doctor friend’s texts today, I can tell he is in a good mood. It is now the third straight day that we have had fewer than 100 new cases, and that number continues to drop. After they put in a new set of leaders at the municipal and provincial levels and started implementing a set of new stricter policies, the virus has quickly been brought under control. When the number of patient infections was at its peak, there was a plan to build an additional 19 temporary hospitals, but now those will clearly not be needed. According to my doctor friend, 11 of the temporary hospitals have already been shut down, and the remaining three will be closing down operations within the next two or three days. Wuhan’s fight against the coronavirus is finally nearing its end; it feels like they are now cleaning up the battlefield. The number of cases of serious infections continues to decline. This decline is due to two primary factors: Some of them have recovered and others have passed away. But right now there are still 4,700 patients who are considered to be in serious condition. This is still a fairly large number. Medical workers are providing them with the best care possible, and we hope those patients will be able to hang in there and recover quickly.
Central Hospital, which has faced multiple calamities over the course of this outbreak, today lost yet another physician, ophthalmologist Dr. Zhu Heping. Before this, Central Hospital had already lost ophthalmologist Dr. Li Wenliang on the evening of February 6; Director of the Department of Thyroid and Breast Cancer, Dr. Jiang Xueqing, on March 1; Director of the Department of Ophthalmology, Mei Zhongming, on March 3. That is four specialists that they have lost, three of whom are from one department. I’ve been told that on the list of patients currently in critical condition, several of them are also doctors from Central Hospital. In the face of such horrific losses, you can’t help but ask, what exactly went wrong at Central Hospital? Why were so many doctors and medical personnel infected? How are the top hospital administrators, including the hospital secretary and director, going to explain this? Was it a simple case of not understanding how this novel coronavirus spreads? Or, using the perspective of “positive energy,” were the doctors at Central Hospital trying to use herd immunity to build a protective wall around the people of Wuhan? Does that make any sense? But these are all questions we should be asking. Today alone I saw several articles that took issue with the actions of the Central Hospital administrators, including an appeal from an insider at the hospital who berated the people in charge. I have no way of knowing if the content of that appeal is accurate, but I know without question that four doctors from Central Hospital have died and 200 other medical workers are currently admitted as patients at hospitals all around the city. Based on those figures alone, I wonder if the secretary and director of Central Hospital even deserve to still be in charge. I’m quite confident that even without them, the rest of the hospital staff would still be able to carry on with their fight against the coronavirus. And so at this point I would like to say: if someone has to take the blame and resign, let’s start with the secretary and director of Central Hospital.
Actually, stepping down to resign is also a matter of common sense. Wouldn’t any reasonable person with a conscience resign if their negligence resulted in the deaths of numerous colleagues? Wouldn’t they want to make up for their mistakes by trying to take actions to repair the damage they caused? But in reality, it is very difficult to find people in China willing to step up and do this. We have a lot of people who understand all kinds of big, abstract theories, but none of them have basic common sense. Sometimes when it comes to these most fundamental concepts, they are a blank, completely lost. It is similar to us listening to those officials give speeches or reading those government directives in the newspaper; it is often torturous enough just to get through it, but in the end we still have no idea what the main point was. Even when there is a clear theme, most of it is usually bullshit anyway. But there are so many commonsense issues that get buried under the dense language of those big concepts; it is hard for even a sliver of common sense to dig itself out from all of that. But these kernels of common sense remain absolutely essential for us.
Yesterday when I was writing about Dr. Yuen Kwok-Yung’s interview, the term “soft intelligence” came up. I think scientists should place more emphasis on soft intelligence. Actually, it’s not just scientists who could benefit from this; people like hospital and government administrators should also start paying more attention to “soft intelligence.” I started wearing a face mask when I went outside way back on January 18; I even told our housekeeper to wear one when she goes shopping. Why is that, you ask? It’s because I had gotten a lot of “soft intelligence” from the people around me, telling me to be extra careful. A shame, then, that our government officials, who are responsible for the lives of millions of people, didn’t exert an ounce of caution. They continued on with their concerts and other mass events all the way up until January 21. Even after Dr. Zhong Nanshan made the announcement on the 20th saying that the virus could indeed spread via human-to-human contact, they still carried on with their big concert! My colleague YL told me what happened to a group of her cinematographer friends; four of them were assigned to shoot the performance at the Tian Han Theater; three members of that team later died from the coronavirus. If the government had informed the public earlier, if they had canceled performances like this one, perhaps we could have saved a lot of lives? So how come everyday people were already taking precautions, while our leaders just ignorantly carried on with business as usual? It is due to a lack of common sense. Their idea of common sense is rooted in a political notion of the term, while our idea of common sense is rooted in life experience.
Today there is an essay being forwarded like crazy on the internet. The title of the article is “The Fourth Round of the Shirking Responsibility Summit Meeting Opens in Wuhan.” Part of the essay mentioned a telephone meeting that was held by the National Health Commission’s Division of Disease Prevention on January 14. I asked my friend to check if this really happened and, indeed, there is a record. There is an article from that date entitled “In Deploying Preventive Measures Against the Infectious Novel Coronavirus, the National Health Commission Holds a Nationwide Tele-Conference.” Here are two paragraphs from that story:
During the meeting it was pointed out that there is currently a high level of uncertainty regarding methods to control this outbreak. Although the outbreak is currently limited to the city of Wuhan, we have still yet to discover the source of this novel coronavirus, nor have we fully grasped its method of transmission. We still need to keep strict watch in order to ascertain its potential for human-to-human spread. Since the Thailand Ministry of Health12 has confirmed several cases from Wuhan, efforts to control the outbreak have undergone considerable change; the spread of the virus may rapidly increase, especially with the onset of spring, and we cannot rule out the possibility of its spreading to other regions. We also cannot rule out the possibility that it could spread outside China into other countries. There is a need to prepare for worst-case scenario possibilities and increase our risk awareness; in terms of risk management, even if a given outcome is highly improbable we need to proceed as if it is the most likely outcome; we need to research the protective measures being used against the outbreak in the areas being affected by the outbreak; we must promptly figure out the most effective means of dealing with what might possibly be a new disease outbreak.
The meeting requests that the direction we take on a national level to control the outbreak follow the lead taken in Wuhan in terms of preventive measures. Hubei Province and the city of Wuhan need to adopt strict control measures with an emphasis on regulating produce markets and close monitoring for individuals with a fever; temperature monitoring stations and hospital clinics admitting patients with flu-like symptoms will be two important lines of defense. We need to in
crease supervision at various events, decrease large-scale public events where people gather, remind patients with fever-like symptoms not to leave Wuhan, bolster treatment plans for patients, and monitor those people who have had close contact with patients. We must implement the strictest measures and take a resolute stance to limit the outbreak to one location and do everything in our power to prevent the further spread of the virus within Wuhan.13