Li Wenliang died at 2:58 on February 7th, 2020. We deeply regret and mourn this.
When Wuhan Central Hospital announced
the death of the 34 year old
ophthalmologist on the social media site
Weibo there was an outpouring of sadness
and anger in China. It was one of the
first signs that something far more
troubling was happening in the city of
Wuhan than the Chinese government was
letting on. When Wenliang had tried to
alert his colleagues via WeChat that he
was witnessing an alarming spike in
respiratory illnesses,
the local government forced him and eight other
people to sign apologetic admissions of
rumor-mongering and that was the
beginning of a disinformation campaign
by government leaders around the world
that would help turn a crisis into a
global pandemic. Chinese officials later
assured the public they'd found no
human-to-human transmissions of the viral
pneumonia he'd posted about and that the
disease was preventable and controllable.
In January government officials shut down the food
market where they suspected the disease
had originated. Nine days later a 61 year
old man who regularly shopped at the market
became the first known fatality.
But what government officials failed to tell the public
was that his wife, who had never visited the market, also caught the virus,
meaning that it was transmittable among humans.
As the hospital ward filled and workers began to fall ill China's politicians still
refused to acknowledge for weeks that
human to human transmission was
happening even staging a 40,000 family
potluck in Wuhan and instructing
hospitals not to use the words viral
pneumonia on lung scan reports as the
death toll in China climbed the national
government pointed fingers at local
authorities and Wu Hans mayor said his
hands were tied by a national law
requiring approval from central
authorities before declaring an epidemic
in late January Lee texted a New York
Times reporter from his hospital bed
that if the officials had disclosed the
information about the epidemic earlier I
think it would have been a lot better
there should have been more openness and
transparency concern for the need to
better guide public opinion on the issue
turned out to be President Xi's
rationale for refusing to disclose human
to human transmission for several weeks
in February authorities jailed an act
serviced who dared criticize she's
handling of the crisis a journalist
reporting stories inside Wuhan critical
of the government's response disappeared
as did a wealthy tycoon who publicly
blamed the Communist Party's speech
restrictions for worsening the spread as
the first u.s. patients began testing
positive the Trump administration
downplayed the threat it's going to
disappear one day it's like a miracle it
will disappear there's no reason to
panic because we have done so good is it
real it absolutely is real there is no
question about it but you saw the
president the other day the flu is real
15 people and the 15 within a couple of
days is going to be down to close to
zero I think this is going to be what
brings down the president that's what
this is all about the lag in testing was
in fact a failing do you take
responsibility for that yeah no I don't
take responsibility at all but there's
also an enormous difference between the
country that jails dissenting voices and
the US with its strong First Amendment
protections the media and political
class have derided Twitter and Facebook
for lacking adequate gatekeepers but it
was through these platforms that medical
professionals technologists
epidemiologists and everyday citizens
bypassed the media and the government to
implore their fellow citizens to act a
Twitter thread from a member of a
seattle-based medical team that defied
the CDC to run tests and discovered an
outbreak in the city in sequence the
genome got the word out about the value
of social distancing long before the
federal government did yell social
scientist and physician Nicholas
Christakis explained the science of
disease spread to further promote social
distancing and self isolation in threads
shared thousands of times On January
30th technologists and venture
capitalists bulgy Srinivasan asked on
Twitter what if this corona virus is the
pandemic that Public Health people have
been warning about four years and then
began encouraging the cancellation of
events pleading for more early testing
and warning about the lack of reliable
information coming out of China he was
critical of early media coverage that
often downplayed the threat of the
outbreak with facile comparisons to the
flu and flippant dismissals of companies
in Silicon Valley that began taking
precautions early of course this
non-issue turned out to be very much
YouTube and it weren't simply getting
the story wrong but they were actively
attempting to shame and silence people
getting the story to bright
and some of them you know later in
sincerely apologized others wrote you
know columns about how they got the
story long the slightly more insincere
women once Trump started adopting their
early talking points about how the virus
was just flu several of them have
reversed themselves and pretended you
know they've been taking it seriously
all along as the government continues to
stumble the decentralized response has
been forthcoming with individuals
voluntarily self isolating after the
flatten the curve chart was circulated
widely on social media doctors in
Seattle defied the federal government to
test for Cova nineteen states like
Colorado implemented their own
drive-through testing stations and
mayors and governors began taking
extreme measures to protect the spread
within dense city centers but to keep
the decentralized response going
information channels will need to remain
as open as possible to this day
dissenters in China are being muzzled or
worse and the Trump administration has
classified several top-level coronavirus
meetings American social media is
chaotic confusing and full of bad actors
and misinformation wild speculation
abounds
but that wild freewheeling conversation
keeps us safer than a censored press or
even a free press controlled by
professionals
the contagious spread of information in
a race against the contagious spread of
the disease remains a powerful weapon
when confronting this global emergency
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