In the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Ai Fen, head of emergency care at the Wuhan Central Hospital was the first person to report the truth. At the time, she was reprimanded for “violating principles and not having organizational discipline by spreading rumours”. Thinking back she wondered, “What did I do wrong?” Ai regretted that she was not more outspoken at the early stages of the outbreak. She remained silent for three weeks after learning about this new mysterious illness, but she wished she had continued to raise the alarm.
Working at the frontline, Ai said she witnessed people dying in the vehicles that transported them to the hospital. Many people died in the emergency room without having been diagnosed and they were not included in the official death count. “I could not do anything apart from seeing more and more patients while the contagion radius expanded from Huanan seafood market to nearby areas. Many cases were clustered household infections,” Ai said.
Ai was the one who posted a report on an infected patient back in December in a doctors’ chat group. This was the post that made Dr. Li Wenliang raise the alarm on the outbreak in Wuhan. He was among eight whistleblowers who were targeted by state police for rumourmongering. She realized the gravity of the situation back then but could not warn others publicly about the virus. As the head of the emergency department, the best she could do was to ask everyone in the emergency ward to protect themselves by wearing masks, caps and sanitize their hands as much as possible.
One doctor suggested they should wear protective gowns. However, during a meeting with hospital administration they were told that doing so would cause too much panic. In the end, she could only ask emergency staff members to wear their protective gowns under their white lab coats. “This did not meet the safety standards, it was so ridiculous,” she said.
On 11 January, the first nurse at Wuhan Central Hospital succumbed to the virus. Ai immediately called for an emergency meeting with hospital officials. During the meeting, Ai was told to remove the words “viral pneumonia” from the report title. Several days later, an associate chief of staff said, “Let’s have some common medical sense, experienced doctors should not allow themselves to scare others to death.” She recalled the tremendous pressure, stress and regret she felt: “I kept thinking if the hospital leadership did not condemn me so harshly but would instead talk about the issue calmly under the presence of other respiratory experts at the early stage, maybe the whole situation would be a lot better now.”
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People’s Republic of China (PRC) magazine “Renwu” (People) published Dr Ai’s interview as their March issue cover story. Ai was the first person who circulated reports about the Wuhan pneumonia (now renamed as COVID-19). However, the 8,000-word cover story article was taken down soon after its publication. Nonetheless, PRC netizens continue to use cryptic ways to circulate the censored article by using emoji icons to replace actual words; and use of ancient Chinese language to recap the story. Circulated on the internet are versions in different languages such as Japanese, Croatian, Italian, English, Korean, and even Morse codes.
(13 Mar) The interview with Ai Fen was deleted shortly after being published and this triggered “online wrestling” between mainland Chinese netizens and internet censorship for consecutive 2 days. First some public wechat accounts forwarded the original article. After the posts were removed again, mainland Chinese netizens started to challenge limits of censorship with variety methods: from Ancient chinese characters Oracle, Carcass, Mao’s style Chinese characters, to Morse code, emoji, QR code, sheet music with music notes, English version, Japanese version, German version, or even Herbrew version etc. Some people even upload the article to blockchain ao that it could never be deleted. According to incomprehensive counting, there are at least 80 versions occured at the moment.
Source: Mingpao, Quartz
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Ref: https://guardiansofhk.com