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Central Wuhan Hospital ER Head Whistleblower: "I Did What Any Doctor Would Do"
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Central Wuhan Hospital ER Head Whistleblower: "I Did What Any Doctor Would Do"

Also, her views from the chaos inside a hospital overcome with coronavirus patients

Jordan Schneider
Mar 12, 2020
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Central Wuhan Hospital ER Head Whistleblower: "I Did What Any Doctor Would Do"
www.chinatalk.media

Some housekeeping: I’m changing the name of this newsletter and podcast to ChinaTalk. The coverage mix will stay the same.


On December 30th, Ai Fen, head of the emergency department of Wuhan’s hardest-hit hospital, saw a patient report of SARS coronavirus. She sent it along to her classmates and attempted to warn the local public health department and hospital higher-ups of the risk. The report quickly went viral among Wuhan’s medical circle, leading to eight doctors, including the now-deceased Li Wenliang, receiving reprimands.

This article details her experience trying to warn the system as well that of medical personnel on the front line.

Dokter Ai Fen, direktur departemen darurat Rumah Sakit Wuhan yang buka suara bagaimana dia dibungkam karena menyebarkan informasi mengenai virus corona.

This article spread like wildfire earlier this week until it was censored. People, a state-owned outlet, published the piece. Says Ryan Manuel of Official China, People is “owned and published by the People’s Daily group, itself an arm of the CCP. [It is] therefore subject to tight regulation and control over content and staffing, although as with most Chinese media, also forced to be profitable enough not to rely on state funding.” He believes that it got published in the first place because it wasn’t directly critical of the central government. Also, since People is a national level outlet, it was able to evade Wuhan censors. 

The reaction to this piece’s censorship has been remarkable. Netizens have come up with increasingly creative ways of getting around WeChat’s censorship to continue sharing the doctor’s reflections. My three favorites use Mao’s calligraphy, seal script (a 2500-year-old form of Chinese writing) and emoji. These efforts are more protest art than anything else, as some are barely readable. Also, I fear they’ll just be used to train algorithms in the future. 

What’s depressing is how similar this feels to this recent NY Times article, which walked through the struggles of a Seattle epidemiologist through January to cut through red tape and get people to pay attention to the risk.

Read till the end for 'China Twitter Tweets of the Week.'

The Whistle Distributor

Published in People. By Gong Jingqi. See the full Chinese version alongside more coverage by the Chinese Media Project here.

The first section is in the reporter's voice.

At 5 am on March 1st, I received a text from Ai Fen, director of the Emergency Department in Wuhan Central Hospital, agreeing to the interview. Half an hour later, her colleague Jiang Xueqing, director of the Breast and Thyroid Center, passed away after falling ill with coronavirus. Two days later, Mei Zhongming, the hospital’s deputy director of ophthalmology, died. He and Li Wenliang were colleagues in the same department.

As of March 9th, 2020, four medical staff in Wuhan Central Hospital have died. Since the outbreak, this hospital, which is only a few kilometers away from the Wuhan Seafood Market, has had the most number of medical staff to fall ill from the virus. According to media reports, more than 200 people have become infected, including many senior personnel. 

The shadow of death hangs over this hospital, Wuhan’s largest. One doctor tells People that no one among the medical staff discusses this; they only mourn quietly and talk in private.

There was a chance to avoid this tragedy. On December 30th, 2019, Ai Fen received a medical report about a patient with an unknown form of pneumonia. She drew a red circle around the words “SARS coronavirus.” When a medical school classmate asked her about it, she shared a photo of the report. That night, the report got sent around the Wuhan medical community, and the eight doctors [including the now-deceased Li Wenliang] were among those who shared the report and were later taken in for questioning by the police.

What follows is Aifen’s narrative, in her voice, written up by the reporter. 

At 11:46 p.m. on Jan. 1, the hospital's control/surveillance department head 医院监察科科长 asked me to come in the morning.

I didn't sleep that night. I was anxious and thought it over and over. But I felt that there are always two sides to everything. Even though I created a bad influence, since I reminded the Wuhan medical personnel to get them to pay attention and be on guard, I figured this might not be such a bad thing. The next morning, a little after 8 a.m., before I could finish my shift, a phone call came urging me to go.

In the talk that followed, I received the harshest reprimand of my career.

At that time, the leader of the conversation said:

We can't hold our heads up when we go out for a meeting. Director so-and-so criticized our hospital saying Aifen, as the director of Wuhan Central Hospital Emergency Department, you’re a professional. How can you have no principles and no sense of team discipline to go around starting rumors and stirring up trouble?

That's the exact words. They then made me go back to the department of more than 200 people, and one by one either face to face or over the phone [not using a mass WeChat message] tell them to say nothing about the disease. “They can’t even tell their husbands”…

I was stunned. He didn't criticize for not working hard, but it seemed that I had singlehandedly ruined Wuhan’s development. I felt desperate. I was a conscientious, hard-working person. I felt that what I was doing was by the book, that it made sense. So what did I do wrong? I saw this report and reported it to my superiors at the hospital, to my [medical school] classmates. Then, people the medical circles began discussion without divulging any private information. If you encounter a patient with an important virus, and another doctor asks for information, how could you not tell them? That's your instinct as a doctor, right? What did I do wrong? 

I did what a doctor, really what any person should do. If anyone else was in my situation, they’d all probably do the same thing.

I was also very emotional and said, I did this thing on my own, and it doesn’t involve anyone else, so if you want to, just hurry up and take me to jail. I said I was not fit to continue working in this position and wanted to take some time off. The leader did not agree, saying that right now is precisely the time to put me to the test.

I remember very clearly coming home that night and telling my husband that if anything happened to me, you better bring up our baby well. Our second child is still very small, just one year old. My husband was completely baffled as I didn't tell him that I had been reprimanded. On January 20th, after Zhong Nanshan said that the virus could spread from person to person, I told him what had happened that day. During that time, I just reminded my family not to go to crowded places and to wear masks when going out.

Lots of friends asked me if I was one of the eight doctors who was reprimanded? To tell the truth, I was not brought in by the Public Security Bureau. Afterward, friends asked me if I was the whistleblower? I told them no, I’m just the person who distributed the whistle.

很多人担心我也是那8个人之一被叫去训诫。实际上我没有被公安局训诫,后来有好朋友问我,你是不是吹哨人?我说我不是吹哨人,我是那个发哨子的人。

All the time I think that had they not reprimanded me but instead calmly discussed the situation’s cause and effects and brought experts in to discuss, maybe the situation would’ve been a little better. At least we could have shared our concerns within the hospital. If on January 1st everyone would’ve been more on guard, there wouldn’t have been as many tragedies.

In our department, because of increased awareness, not many medical personnel fell ill, unlike in other departments like Li Wenliang’s and Jiang Xueqing’s. They didn’t have the time or energy to make inquiries about this sort of thing. Maybe if they were able to hear the right advice in time, we wouldn’t have arrived at this day. So, as a person involved in this affair, I have huge regrets.

If I knew what I know today, I would have gone and told every damn person.

She then goes on to recount stories of the subsequent few weeks when the crisis was at its peak. Anything in paraphrased is in italics while straight translations are in regular font.

On January 21rd, the emergency room had 1523 sick people, three times more than their previous most busy day. Patients were rushing forth from all directions, and behind them, the streets were completely jammed up.

One patient’s family member waited in line for hours. When he finally got to see a doctor, he said that his father was sick and still in the car. Since the parking lot was full, the doctor had to walk far to check on the man. By the time they arrived, the father had already died.

Before, if you made a small mistake like you weren’t on time for a scheduled injection, patients would make a huge fuss. But now no-one acts that way. Everyone was just going about as if they were in shock.

When the patients die, it’s very rare to see family members crying because there are too, too many. Some families didn't even plead with us to save them. Instead, they'd sigh and say, 'At this point, please just let them pass quickly.'

They're now is scared of spending time in the hospital since they fear getting infected themselves.

Before the coronavirus, the sorts of patients we got in the emergency room we always had a standardized way of handling. That level of busyness was an extremely satisfying one. But this time handling so many sick people and being unable to help and unable to find them beds, this sort of busy leaves you helpless and pained.

Many doctors have a tough time emotionally. Coming across such a crazy situation, some doctors and nurses just cry, on behalf of others and themselves, as every day they aren’t sure when will be the day they catch the sickness themselves.

Towards the end of January, our hospital’s leadership one by one fell ill. So during that time, we basically had no management, and it felt like, ‘well, we just gotta stand there and fight’ that sort of feeling.

40 employees of the emergency department fell ill with coronavirus. In their wechat group (named the “Jia You Group”) they often discussed their health situation. Often their heart rates stayed around 120 beats per minute. Even if they don’t’ die from the disease, they have no idea if one day their health will be impacted. Many doctors are now thinking of resigning.

On February 21st, I had a meeting with a leader at the hospital. I wanted to ask him whether or not the criticism I received was right. I wanted an apology, but I didn’t dare ask. To this day, no-one has expressed to me any sense of remorse. But this experience makes me believe even more that everyone must maintain their independent thinking because there need to be people to take a stand and speak the truth.

Thanks to Izzy, Tony, and Athena for help translating.

China Twitter Tweets of the Week

[the first one is from a parody account]

Twitter avatar for @relevantorgans
The Relevant Organs @relevantorgans
Let this be a lesson to Daryl Morey and his clique.
Twitter avatar for @ChinaDaily
China Daily @ChinaDaily
.@NBA has suspended the season until further notice over the novel #coronavirus concerns. #COVID19 https://t.co/3RxdoM2ymd
1:47 AM ∙ Mar 12, 2020
33Likes8Retweets
Twitter avatar for @xujnx
Jin Xu @xujnx
Ni Zan (14c), one of most celebrated landscape painters in Chinese history, was also a mysophobe. Obsessed with hygiene, he’s said to wash his hands constantly, keep everything in his home dustless - trees in his garden died from too much washing. His works always void of people.
Image
Image
5:45 PM ∙ Mar 10, 2020
201Likes66Retweets
Twitter avatar for @JulianGewirtz
Julian Gewirtz @JulianGewirtz
Calling COVID19 a “foreign disease,” & w/arbitrary, politicized blocking of travel/trade, Trump reveals how politicians can seize on outbreaks to scapegoat outsiders. China's Communist Party has made an art of the same, as I show in a new article [THREAD]
academic.oup.com‘Loving Capitalism Disease’: Aids and Ideology in the People’s Republic of China, 1984–2000 *Abstract. This article examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interpreted HIV/AIDS in the period from 1984, when the Chinese government first introduce
2:11 PM ∙ Mar 12, 2020
21Likes14Retweets
Twitter avatar for @isaacstonefish
Isaac Stone Fish @isaacstonefish
The end of the Warren campaign marks the end of the 战国时期,or Warren states period. I'm sorry, I just had to.
9:43 PM ∙ Mar 5, 2020
352Likes48Retweets

Isaac was on a ‘roll’ this week…

Twitter avatar for @isaacstonefish
Isaac Stone Fish @isaacstonefish
While we're talking about the Chinese health system: of the roughly 15 hospitals I've visited in China, most didn't have soap in the bathrooms. I remember asking someone at the hospital why, and she said "because people steal the soap."
1:49 PM ∙ Mar 5, 2020
544Likes169Retweets
Twitter avatar for @paulmozur
Paul Mozur 孟建国 @paulmozur
Really distressing news. Just realized all my favorite WeChat politician gifs have been censored. None of these go through anymore. Had been wondering for a while why I was getting no response when I’d drop a witty Jiang Zemin gif.
Image
10:58 AM ∙ Mar 12, 2020
76Likes14Retweets
Twitter avatar for @JiayangFan
Jiayang Fan @JiayangFan
So stuck on a piece I want to weep. Only thing I want in is bubbletea but can’t justify Bc already spent $20 on pure sugar beverages. Leaving teashop,woman says,hey I have 3 cups of tea uber didnt pick up, u want?”& it was like god brushed his satin fingers on my v damp cheeks
3:02 AM ∙ Mar 5, 2020
375Likes8Retweets
Twitter avatar for @tony_zy
Tony Lin 林東尼 @tony_zy
After talking to several friends, I realize many ppl still aren't prepared for the societal impacts of coronavirus. Want to dedicate a thread about what I observed in Chinese society, and what you should be mentally prepared for. It goes beyond the disease itself:
4:00 AM ∙ Mar 7, 2020
18,671Likes7,682Retweets
Twitter avatar for @EBKania
Elsa B. Kania @EBKania
The APT1 report was a wake-up call for the Chinese government with regard to the feasibility of attribution and potential for ‘naming and shaming’ as an attempt at deterrence. Qihoo has been an important contributor to building up capabilities in response.
Twitter avatar for @EBKania
Elsa B. Kania @EBKania
I remember five years ago when I was an intern at @FireEye and reading Qihoo’s report on OceanLotus. I wondered at the time when their team would attempt to attribute a ‘U.S. APT.’ Well, here it is: https://t.co/LKf3V23Q3u
8:43 PM ∙ Mar 3, 2020
23Likes9Retweets
Twitter avatar for @ToddinChina1
Todd in China @ToddinChina1
I decided to establish my own tank because I noticed the others are mostly full of older folks. I'm not one to knock the olds, but I think fresh eyes are needed. The world needs thoughts from people who haven't been in China *all* their lives. People who can maintain distance.
2:25 AM ∙ Mar 4, 2020

response to last week’s newsletter:

Twitter avatar for @WenruiDonovanWu
Wenrui Wu @WenruiDonovanWu
@jordanschnyc You won't find your partner to be "脑残" if you don't have a partner. XD "The sage king doesn't do anything, so he never fails." (是故圣人无为故无败) - Lao Tzu Such is ancient Chinese philosopher's wisdom! XD
Image
12:24 PM ∙ Mar 3, 2020

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Central Wuhan Hospital ER Head Whistleblower: "I Did What Any Doctor Would Do"
www.chinatalk.media
2 Comments
Venkatesh Rao
Mar 13, 2020

hmm, just a fact check, People Magazine is not owned by People's Daily. It's publisher is People's Publishing House, not People's Daily Publishing House

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