Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

I also want to record what Professor Liu Liang and his team have been doing; under the most difficult conditions, they have been conducting autopsies on novel coronavirus victims in order to further research this disease. I saw a video interview with Professor Liu that really opened my eyes to the challenges that he and his team are facing each day. I really have the utmost respect for the work that he is doing. I’m sure that his efforts will greatly benefit our future treatment and preventive strategies for this virus moving forward. I’m especially moved by those family members who have selflessly agreed to let their loved one’s bodies be donated for research. Without their sacrifice, Professor Liu’s team would be unable to achieve any new breakthroughs in our understanding of the novel coronavirus. Human knowledge is always long eclipsed by the broad expanse of the unknown; in order to expand our understanding by just a tiny bit, we need to rely on the strenuous efforts of many people. But for a literary person like me, all I can do is keep a record of the things I see and hear.

Right now there are still quite a few new suspected cases of coronavirus in Wuhan. Who are these people? Where did they get infected? I got a private message from someone online telling me that some of them are volunteers and another portion of them are community workers. That sounds like it makes sense. Those volunteers have been out and about all over the city providing all kinds of services; those community workers have also been incredibly busy during this unusual time. The higher-ups are always giving them pressure to carry out all kinds of tasks, and the citizens down below go to them for almost everything. Some of these people can be very difficult with their requests, and everyone is waiting for them to deliver results; but it is still hard to say who the ones getting infected really are. Their protective gear is not nearly as good as what medical professionals have; in fact, some of them only have disposable face masks. But then one of my friends told me that there were a lot of infections among the volunteers and community workers early on, but right now there are close to none. She said: “During the early stage of the outbreak, things were fairly stable at all the retirement homes, prisons, and mental hospitals. More recently there has been more testing being done at these types of facilities, and that has resulted in some new cases being added to the numbers.” Everyone seems to have their own interpretation to explain the spike in numbers.

The people of Wuhan seem to be quite calm these days. Of course, they might just be weary and depressed. In order to prevent multiple exposures, people are no longer allowed to crowd around the main gate to pick up their online grocery deliveries. But everyone is stuck inside and they still need to eat, so they came up with an alternate method: Everyone now ties a rope to a bucket and slowly lowers it down from their balconies, then community workers fill up their buckets with their groceries and hoist them back up. Some of them hoist their buckets all the way up as high as the sixth floor! It is a technical feat, but most people are adapting quickly. I watched a two-minute video of some people hoisting their groceries up and couldn’t help but feel a strange sadness. The challenges and difficulties that the people of Wuhan and all these community workers are experiencing are really quite out of the ordinary.

February 29, 2020

The silence of the collective is always the most terrifying thing.

It is clear again today. That’s how the weather has been going lately: clear then overcast, clear then overcast; it’s kind of like my Wuhan Diary —first they allow it, then they crack down on it, then they allow it, then they crack down on it again. I’ve been cooped up at home for so long, I wonder how I’ll adapt once we are allowed to go outside again. I even wonder if I’ll be willing to go back outside. Today my neighbor Tang Xiaohe sent me a series of recent photos of East Lake; they look like they were taken by a drone. The lake is empty and quiet, the red and white plum blossoms along the lake are in full bloom; it is truly gorgeous beyond description. I forwarded the photo to another colleague and she said that staring at the photo, she felt like she was going to cry. My goodness, “[h]ow I lament the disappearance of spring. Crimson apricot flowers. Red begonias. I gaze on the delicate branches, and silently curse the lord in heaven.” [38] Here the author is quoting the first lines of the poem “Son of the River Town” (“Jiangcheng zi”) by the Song poet Liu Chenweng (1232–1297). These lines of poetry really fit my mood right now.

I have a very strong sense that most people in Wuhan are feeling a bit depressed these days. Even my most vibrant and outgoing colleagues have all fallen silent. Barely anyone in my family sends texts to our chat group anymore. Is everyone just sitting at home binge-watching TV shows? I certainly hope that’s the case. It is a real test of will to remain quarantined and idle for this long. Everyone in the city of Wuhan is living with this strange, unspeakable stress; I’m afraid people outside the city have no way to truly understand what we are going through. There are no words strong enough to capture the sacrifices that the people of Wuhan have had to make during this outbreak. We will continue to hold on; we will continue to listen to the government and follow the instructions they give us. Today is already the 38th day of the quarantine.

With the exception of Wuhan, the coronavirus is now under control, with zero new cases reported outside of Hubei. The situation in Wuhan is also looking better. My doctor friend told me that there were nearly 40,000 people who fall into the category of having had close contact with confirmed patients; he wondered if all the new suspected cases were from this same pool of people. If they are, then these new confirmed cases are also mostly from that pool of suspected patients. Assuming that is true, then we indeed have a much clearer picture of the outbreak and its pattern. We just need to screen those 40,000 patients to confirm this. From this perspective, the outbreak in Wuhan could be considered to be under control. However, my doctor friend remains cautious about getting too optimistic; he feels that the published government statistics need to be a bit more detailed before he is ready to make any conclusions. But I’m already starting to feel more optimistic. Although there are still some people from those four categories who have fallen through the net and remain among the general population of nine million residents, I’m sure that with our current screening capabilities and methods we will be able to locate everyone quickly.

Today one of my friends sent me a video from Shandong Province; it was of the people in Zibo welcoming the Blue Sky Aid Team back home after returning from their humanitarian aid trip to Wuhan. Everyone was in tears to see the group safely returning home. After watching the video, I was in tears too. It is hard to imagine what things would have looked like in Wuhan if we didn’t have support from all those aid teams that came in from all over China. So many people were crying because they all understood the dangers involved in coming to Wuhan to offer help; returning home in one piece is indeed a blessing. I have heard that in Wuhan, besides the high rate of infections among medical professionals, the police have also been hit hard. I was somewhat surprised to learn this, so I searched online and, indeed, nearly 400 police officers in Hubei Province have been infected with the novel coronavirus. I never imagined it was so many.

I decided to write to a police officer friend of mine to find out what the situation was like with him and his fellow officers. He responded by saying that he and his colleagues have consistently been on the front lines of this outbreak. He personally has not taken a single day off since the outbreak began. They needed to ensure that all the basic transportation networks in the city were still functioning for deliveries and so that medical personnel could still get to where they needed to be, yet at the same time they also had to control pedestrians and private cars that shouldn’t be out on the streets; somehow they needed to be able to differentiate between these two groups. A lot of police officers have been helping drive patients to and from the hospitals; there simply were not enough EMTs and medical workers to transport all those patients. Moreover, all the roads in and out of the city need to have officers on guard 24 hours a day in order to ensure that medical aid workers can pass, while making sure that other traffic is prohibited. Besides this, a police presence is also needed at each hospital, quarantine location, and various public service locations in order to maintain order, direct traffic, and help resolve conflicts between doctors and unruly patients. Since the police have so much contact with patients, their risk for infection is also quite high. So it is not strange at all to hear that so many police officers have been infected. My friend encouraged me on: “Please write about what the police are going through; we really have been working nonstop!”