In early March, the Chinese magazine Renwu published an article by the head of the admission department of the Central Hospital in Wuhan, the city from which the spread of the new coronavirus infection began. The doctor talked about how the clinic's management tried to delay the spread of information about the new disease and what this led to. The article was soon removed from the Internet, and Ai Fen herself was rumored to have been secretly detained. "Lenta.ru" figured out what happened.
On December 18, 2019, a 65-year-old man with an unusual respiratory infection was admitted to the admission department of Wuhan Central Hospital. He had been ill for several days and managed to go to the clinic, where he was prescribed antibiotics. But medications did not help: the temperature remained high, and it was impossible to bring it down. He underwent bronchoscopy, computed tomography and bronchoalveolar lavage, and a sample of fluid from his lungs was sent for analysis.
The head of the admissions department, Ai Fen, believes that this was the first patient with a new coronavirus infection whom she examined. Before his illness, the man worked in the Wuhan Huanan seafood market, where they traded exotic animals, including bats - carriers of the coronavirus, which, after mutation, became the causative agent of COVID-19. But then they did not know about it yet. By that time, only a few cases of severe pneumonia of unknown origin were recorded in Wuhan, and they did not yet understand what it threatened.
Ai Fen.
On December 27, a second patient with the same symptoms was transferred to Wuhan Central Hospital. He was 20 years younger than the first, did not suffer from chronic diseases, but tolerated the infection even worse. Before the transfer, the man was treated for ten days in another Wuhan clinic, but his health continued to deteriorate. When the patient was taken to the emergency room, his blood was only 90 percent saturated with oxygen - noticeably worse than that of a healthy person.
Three days later, Ai Fen received the test results of the second patient. The printout listed the pathogens found in the lungs: several colonies of various respiratory bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and the SARS coronavirus. In an interview with the Chinese magazine Renwu, Ai Fen recalled reading the list in a cold sweat. The SARS coronavirus was the causative agent of the SARS outbreak in 2003. It was possible to suppress it in the bud, but among those infected, the mortality rate reached nine percent, and among patients over 50 years old, every second died.
The doctor immediately reported the opening to the hospital management and sent a photo of the test results to a doctor she knew from another clinic - they studied together at the institute and recently corresponded that more and more respiratory patients who had been at the seafood market were brought to Wuhan hospitals. In a matter of hours, the image was distributed among medical groups in the Chinese messenger WeChat. Soon, ordinary Internet users began to exchange rumors about a new outbreak of SARS.
That evening, Ai Fen received several messages from her superiors. She was warned not to spread information about the new disease, and was threatened that if she disobeyed, she would have to be held accountable. “I couldn't sleep all night, I was worried and thought about what happened,” she recalls. It occurred to me that everything has two sides. Even if my actions entail some negative consequences, there is nothing wrong with reminding the Wuhan doctors to be more careful."
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The next morning, Ai Fen was summoned to the hospital disciplinary committee and severely reprimanded. Although she took all the blame, eight more doctors were punished for discussing her picture on WeChat. One of them was the ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who also worked at the Wuhan Central Hospital. A month later, the media will say that he was twice summoned to the police, reprimanded for violating public order and forced to sign a document in which he promised not to spread unfounded rumors.
After meeting with her superiors, Ai Fen asked to be removed from her position, but was refused. “In the evening I returned home, I clearly remember how I told my husband from the doorway that if something happened, he would have to raise the child alone,” the doctor told Renwu. She decided not to tell her relatives about the coronavirus and her punishment, but warned them not to go to crowded places and put on medical masks on the street.
On the same day, the Chinese authorities notified the World Health Organization that several cases of pneumonia of unknown origin were found in Wuhan. This was the first official admission that the problem exists. The new disease still did not even have a name, and no one could say with certainty exactly how it was transmitted and how dangerous it was.
Epidemic
Ai Fen returned to work on January 1st. The doctor was worried that even doctors were not warned of the potential danger. Admitting the existence of the infection was allowed only in personal conversations; it was impossible to write about it in the messenger or SMS. In addition, the authorities forbade doctors and nurses to wear protective equipment so as not to sow panic. Ai Fen told her employees to hide their protective suits under their robes - there was nothing else she could do.
In just a day, seven more people were admitted to her department with the same infection. The situation worsened with each passing hour. Initially, many of the patients were associated with the seafood market in one way or another, but these cases soon decreased. People who never went to Huanan got sick, and sometimes whole families ended up in the hospital.
Wuhan doctors are fighting for the life of a patient with COVID-19.
Ai Fen began to suspect that, contrary to the official version, the new coronavirus could be transmitted between people. "The seafood market was closed on January 1, why then there are more and more patients if people cannot infect each other?" she asked. The hospital authorities refused to listen to her even after one of the nurses in the emergency department became ill. At an emergency meeting on January 16, Wuhan doctors were again assured that human-to-human transmission of the virus was ruled out.
Only the intervention of the 83-year-old academician Zhong Nanshan, the famous Chinese epidemiologist, who discovered the SARS coronavirus in 2003, could change their opinion. He arrived in Wuhan and instantly realized that the city was on the verge of an epidemic. On January 19, he told reporters that the new coronavirus infection is transmitted from person to person. The next day, official Beijing took the fight against the crisis into its own hands. In Wuhan and the province of Hubei, where the city is located, all mass events were immediately canceled, a strict quarantine was declared, entry and exit were closed, and the construction of temporary hospitals for patients with COVID-19 began.
A few hours before the city closed, Ai Fen received a call from a doctor he knew and asked what was really going on. Ai Fen asked that this information remain between them, and replied: on January 21, 1,523 people were brought to her department - three times more than usual. 655 had a high fever.
And that was just the beginning. The number of patients increased every day. Overcrowded intensive care units stopped accepting patients, and they had to be placed in the corridors. Someone was dying near the hospital before they could be admitted.
The disease mowed down the doctors themselves. More than 200 employees of the Central Hospital became infected in January and February. In mid-March, some of them remained in serious condition, and four died - including the ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who was called to the police for spreading rumors. By the end of January, one after another, the hospital managers fell ill - the very people who prevented the spread of information about the new coronavirus infection, when the epidemic could still be prevented.
Censorship
In an interview with Renwu, Ai Fen admitted that she still regrets that she complied with the demands of her superiors in December. “If I knew what was going to happen next, I wouldn't give a damn about their reprimands,” she says. - I would tell about it to everyone I meet, to everyone I could.”
A faster response to illness could indeed save many lives. Chinese experts have calculated that if quarantine had been introduced in Wuhan just a week earlier, then two-thirds of those infected with the new coronavirus infection would have remained healthy. Actively controlling the outbreak since early January would have reduced the number of infections in China by 95 percent.
The March issue of Renwu, featuring Ai Fen's story of how the epidemic began, was released on March 10. After just three hours, the article was removed from the website of the publication and other Chinese sites that managed to reprint it, and the magazine itself disappeared from the shelves. It is hardly the reason for its content: the magazine Renwu, which published it, is loyal to the Chinese authorities and would not publish anything seditious. BBC News points out that on the day of publication, Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a visit to Wuhan. Perhaps this unfortunate coincidence led to an exacerbation of censorship.
Article by Ai Fen, translated into the Elven language from The Lord of the Rings.
Ai Fen's article in sign language.
Article by Ai Fen, written in the Jiaguen letters.
Jiaguen is considered to be the oldest Chinese script. These hieroglyphs were invented in the XIV-XI centuries BC and were used to record the results of fortune-telling.
Ai Fen's article encoded with a barcode.
The disappearance of the Renwu article angered internet users in China. They tried to copy the text on Chinese social networks, but they began to delete it there too. To get around the automation that seeks and censors forbidden texts, Ai Fen's story began to be encoded in a variety of ways. In a matter of days, it was translated into Morse code, elven letters from The Lord of the Rings, emoji, sign language, braille, ancient Jiaguven hieroglyphs, which are used on oracle bones, and the calligraphic style of Zhuanshu, which was adopted in the kingdom of Qin.
On March 29, Australian television program 60 Minute Australia announced that Ai Fen had disappeared following publication in Renwu. The authors of the story suggested that the doctor was secretly detained by the authorities. Over the past few years, several prominent representatives of Chinese business, science and culture have been subjected to such secret arrests, including the famous Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, geneticist He Jiankui, photographer Lu Guang and financier Xiao Jianhua. After a few months, they usually appeared in public, confessed their wrongdoings and promised to atone for their guilt.
Whether Ai Fen really shared the fate of Fan Bingbing and Xiao Jianhua remains to be seen. After the broadcast of 60 Minute Australia on Ai Fen, a new entry appeared on her Weibo page with a view of Wuhan and a cryptic caption: “River. Bridge. Road. Clock chime . Radio Free Asia notes that this cannot be considered a refutation of the arrest, since the authorities could access her account - this has already happened.
Ai Fen's latest post on Weibo.
But the opposite cannot be ruled out either. Ai Fen is a busy person and rarely posts on social media. In February, after Li Wenliang's death, it was rumored that Ai Fen was also ill and may have already died. She had to break the prolonged silence and announce that she was fine. Perhaps the reason for the rumors about her disappearance is the same. The peak of the epidemic in Wuhan has passed, the quarantine has ended, but doctors now have something to do. Not up to the Internet.
Author: Oleg Paramonov