Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

What’s the point of saying anything else? We just have to wait. We need to try to remain calm and steady and just wait. To borrow my big brother’s way of describing it in simple language: “It’s boring as hell, but you have no choice but just stay home and binge-watch TV miniseries to help pass the time.”

Today my doctor friend told me that quite a few patients have just been released from the hospitals. So far, more than 2,000 patients have recovered; mild cases are fairly easy to treat. There are now quite a few hospital beds available. The number of patients dying has also dropped considerably. I looked up the figures and discovered that during the previous couple of days there were around a hundred deaths each day, but yesterday that number dropped to 29. How I hope we can get that number down to zero soon! Then all those anxious and worried families will finally be able to rest easy again. As long as we can stay alive, everything else can be figured out later. If it takes longer to treat people, it’s okay; take your time, we can handle the wait. I just watched an episode of Southern City News that profiled the process of a doctor trying to save a coronavirus patient. The episode included interview footage with both the doctor and the patient, and it was quite moving. The patient who survived said that he needed to rely on his own willpower, along with the faith his doctor had in him to get through it. Another patient said that after surviving this entire journey he feels that he will now treasure each and every day that lies ahead. That’s right; there is nothing better than staying alive.

What continues to stump people is the continuing high numbers of new infections that we are still seeing, which has left Wuhan in something of a stalemate position with the virus. Just yesterday the number of new and probable infections was up to 900. This is not the result we have been looking for. All these people must have gotten infected after the citywide quarantine went into effect. We need to know who these people are, where they live, the circumstances of how they got infected; it would be good if the coronavirus report that comes out every day could include more details like this. If some of these details were made public, perhaps others would be better able to protect themselves. Also, based on location, perhaps the government could start relaxing the quarantine for areas located far away from the hot spots. Another doctor friend of mine feels that the coronavirus outbreak is already under control; almost all the new cases are confined to jails and nursing homes. If that’s the case, then how come so many people still need to be quarantined to their homes? Perhaps we’ll be getting some good news soon? But that is just a hopeful guess!

From the perspective of infectious diseases, 900 is a fairly large number, but when you look at it in relation to a population of tens of millions of people who live in Hubei Province, it is just a tiny fraction. But this tiny fraction of the population is holding tens of millions of healthy people hostage in their own homes; when you think about it like that, who wouldn’t be upset? And what will those healthy people be facing down the road? Will the price they have to pay be even greater? I can’t say for sure.

And then there are those five million people from Wuhan who are stuck outside the city unable to return home; I wonder how they have been getting through all this. They faced a lot of prejudice early on; I wonder if that has improved at all? There are also those people from other provinces working in Wuhan who are stuck here and unable to get out of the city. I saw a report the other day about some of them who don’t have enough money for a hotel or simply couldn’t find a hotel and ended up sleeping in the train station. Others don’t have enough to eat and end up going through the garbage and eating other people’s leftovers. Those people in change of steering the ship often neglect these small details; those in charge of looking after the majority often overlook those more marginalized individuals. One good bit of news was that I did later see a report about a “help hotline for individuals from out of town stuck in Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak.” Each district has its own hotline for people to call. I just don’t know if when you call, those hotline operators really have the power to help these people out. I know that a lot of those types of hotlines are only set up as a show to make the political leaders look good. If you actually call these numbers, you’ll find they are basically useless. Just give it a try. If you call, you’ll just get the runaround, but no real help; in the end you’ll just waste the price of the phone call. The world of officialdom is filled with people who have never learned a damn thing in their entire lives, but one thing they have mastered is the art of putting on a show; and they have ways to deal with you that you would have never imagined even existed. Their ability to shirk responsibility is also second to none; if they didn’t have a good foundation in all these worthless skills, this outbreak would have never grown into the large-scale calamity that it is today.

From the first cases of the coronavirus in Wuhan to the point when the quarantine was imposed, there was a delay of more than 20 days; this is an undisputed fact. But what was the main reason for this delay? Who, exactly, caused this delay that would give the coronavirus time and space to spread, leading to the unprecedented lockdown of the entire city of Wuhan? Quarantining nearly nine million people to their homes is a strange and rare situation, but certainly not one to be proud of. There must be an investigation to get to the root cause behind this delay.

There are a lot of reporters in China who kiss up to the government, but we still have never had a shortage of brave journalists who dare to speak up. These past few days I have witnessed a group of journalists who have been relentlessly digging to get the real stories out there. In the internet age we need to rely on journalists to carry out in-depth investigative research, and we need netizens everywhere to do their part by helping to shed light on those critical events in order to gradually expose all those secrets that have been hidden away and covered up.

No matter what happens, there is a process we need to go through to get to the bottom of what has happened. For instance, there were three groups of specialists that came to Wuhan. We need to know things like: Who were the members of each group? Who led each group? Who was the host organization in Wuhan that received them? Which hospitals did they visit? How many departments did they visit? How many meetings did they hold? Who spoke at those meetings? Which doctors did they question? What kind of information did they get from those doctors? What kind of records did they review? What did they learn from the materials they reviewed? What conclusions did they come to? Who had the final say in the groups’ decisions? These are the questions we need to be asking. After all, those eight words, “Not Contagious Between People, It’s Controllable and Preventable,” resulted in untold suffering for the Wuhan people; there needs to be some accountability. If we dig deeply enough, we can certainly figure out who have been the liars through all this. We need to figure out who lied and why they lied, under whose orders did they decide to skirt the truth; did they know these were blatant lies, or was someone intentionally spreading false information and they just chose to believe it; did they feel they had no choice but to accept these deceptions? Did these lies come from the government or from those teams of specialists? Through careful investigation we should be able to get to the bottom of all of this. For a catastrophe of this scale, simply firing a few officials is not enough to settle this matter. The people of Wuhan will settle for nothing less than full accountability for all those who had a part in orchestrating these lies and carrying out the damaging policies that followed. More than 2,000 “murdered” souls (I’m sure there are even more who have not been counted in the official numbers) and their family members have died and suffered, medical professionals have been struggling day and night to save critically ill patients, nine million Wuhan residents have been forced to self-quarantine, five million Wuhan residents have been stuck outside the city, unable to return home—all of us want an explanation; all of us want some kind of closure.