Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

The chaos from the early phase of the outbreak has passed. From what I have learned, specialists are now drafting a report on how to ensure that victims of novel coronavirus and their families are treated in a more dignified manner. This means creating measures through which the final articles of the deceased, such as their cellphones, will be saved for their family members. The current suggestion is to collect those items together in a secure place and disinfect them once this outbreak has passed. Then the telecommunications company will attempt to use the cellphone numbers to contact family members. At the very least, these phones will serve as an item to commemorate those who died. If no family members are able to be contacted and the phones can no longer be stored, perhaps they can serve as an exhibit to bear witness to the history that played out here in Wuhan.

The reason I still have faith in this world is owing to those kindhearted and rational people who are still busy working hard for something good.

February 17, 2020

You aren’t the only one suffering and facing difficulties, there are a lot of ways to live.

Another clear day; if it had been any other time, there would certainly be a lot of people outside sitting in the sun. A shame that no one will be able to enjoy a scene like this for a while. But it is understandable; after all, these are unusual times. I suppose that we should be happy that we can at least enjoy the sunlight and foliage through the window.

The strictest government order on the quarantine has just been issued: Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times. Exceptions will only be made for those who are still required to report to work or carry out official business during the quarantine, but even they will be required to carry a special permit. I heard that if you are caught outside without a permit you will be put in strict quarantine for 14 days, but I’m not sure if that is true. One of those witty online jokesters posted that he thought the people of Wuhan actually had it pretty good. If they had been in Huanggang they would have also been forced to take the Huanggang Secret Edition Second Grade Math Exam while under quarantine, which more than half of the adults couldn’t even complete! Those online jokesters have been fairly quiet these past few days; this is one of the better jokes I have seen from them. I hope they can step up their game—after being locked up at home for 20 days now, the people of Wuhan could use some comic relief that they can forward to their friends.

For someone like me, staying at home is a fairly simple task. My dog can just run around in my courtyard, so I don’t need to take him out for walks. It is a good thing that he is so old; a few laps around the courtyard and he is ready to come back into the laundry room to take a nap. After I bought him his own little heating pad, he is even more reluctant to ever leave his little dog bed. This year it is really as if I had some second sense or something. Back in mid-January as we were preparing for the Chinese New Year, I suddenly had the impulse to buy a new heating boiler. The heating company came to install it on their last day of work before the New Year holiday. The old heater still worked, but it was getting old and, after using it for so many years, I was afraid it might not be safe to continue using it. The new heater is indeed much more powerful than the old one; you can set it so that the room temperature will stay between 22 and 25 Celsius and I don’t have to worry about any safety issues with it. Earlier it warmed up a bit outside and the temperature in my apartment got up to over 25 degrees; I even started to feel hot!

With the strict prohibition of going outside now fully in force, those online grocery delivery groups have really been taking off while all the other traditional e-commerce sites have also been tweaking their sales methods. Had it not been for those e-commerce sites, I really don’t know how we would have gotten through these days we have been stuck at home. Without the help of those websites, just feeding a typical family would have been challenging for most households. Now that those community grocery delivery groups have been popping up everywhere, the e-commerce companies are also getting on board. Their sales model allows them to make flexible adjustments based on the on-the-ground situation. They are now offering all kinds of meals available for “contact-free delivery”; residents can register through their grocery shopping group and the e-commerce companies take care of the purchasing and shipping. The manager of the online group can also better organize how the group functions in response to the adjustments made by the e-commerce companies. Compared to those idiotic actions taken by those stubborn old petrified bureaucrats who just stamp forms all day, these capable people from the private sector really put them to shame! This is what it looks like when your working method is informed by practical and realistic goals; the government should really take some notes from them and learn to appreciate this method of getting things done. To speak completely frankly, if it hadn’t been for their stubborn old work model, repeated delays at multiple levels, and various mistakes, the outbreak would have never gotten to where it is today. My old classmate Lao Geng knows that I don’t want to personally join any of those online grocery groups, so he just forwards me the lists of what they have available for purchase. The day before yesterday I ordered a Kengee Bread Set Meal. It was humongous—there was enough food for three people! It was really too much for just me; I’m afraid I’ll be eating this for the next 10 days.

Today I also reached out to one of my doctor friends to get a sense of where things currently stand with the outbreak. Mostly it was just me asking questions and him answering them. I could sum up our conversation with the following points:

1. Regarding the comments about the “turning point” having already arrived, which were made by the Director of Leishenshan Hospital: My friend said that Director Wang’s use of the term “turning point” was referring to something else. In medical circles, the term “turning point” has a different meaning. To put it plainly, it refers to when the number of infected patients reaches a peak. From this perspective, we still have yet to reach this turning point. This means that the number of infected patients is still expected to further climb. But my doctor friend thinks that by late February or early March we should see a true turning point. That means we still have at least two more weeks to go.

2. Regarding the large number of medical professionals who have been infected or even sacrificed their lives, I wanted to know how they have been doing. According to my friend, more than 3,000 medical professionals have been infected. The vast majority of them should be able to make a full recovery, but because this disease takes a long time to run its full course, the majority of them have yet to be released from the hospital. This figure of 3,000 is an official statistic provided by the government, but I suspect that the actual number might be a bit higher. Most of these individuals were infected either early on before doctors and nurses were wearing proper protective gear or later during that period when hospitals were running out of supplies. But right now very few healthcare professionals are getting infected.

3. As to whether hospitals in Wuhan have been using traditional Chinese medicine to treat coronavirus patients: My doctor friend responded that 75 percent of the patients have been treated with traditional Chinese medicine, which has shown clear signs of being effective. When I asked him why that other 25 percent of patients were not treated with Chinese medicine, he said that was because they were all undergoing intubation, so those other treatments were not able to be administered. All those patients being intubated were clearly the more severe cases, which I found to be a pretty terrifying percentage.