Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

Central Hospital, which has faced multiple calamities over the course of this outbreak, today lost yet another physician, ophthalmologist Dr. Zhu Heping. Before this, Central Hospital had already lost ophthalmologist Dr. Li Wenliang on the evening of February 6; Director of the Department of Thyroid and Breast Cancer, Dr. Jiang Xueqing, on March 1; Director of the Department of Ophthalmology, Mei Zhongming, on March 3. That is four specialists that they have lost, three of whom are from one department. I’ve been told that on the list of patients currently in critical condition, several of them are also doctors from Central Hospital. In the face of such horrific losses, you can’t help but ask, what exactly went wrong at Central Hospital ? Why were so many doctors and medical personnel infected? How are the top hospital administrators, including the hospital secretary and director, going to explain this? Was it a simple case of not understanding how this novel coronavirus spreads? Or, using the perspective of “positive energy,” were the doctors at Central Hospital trying to use herd immunity to build a protective wall around the people of Wuhan? Does that make any sense? But these are all questions we should be asking. Today alone I saw several articles that took issue with the actions of the Central Hospital administrators, including an appeal from an insider at the hospital who berated the people in charge. I have no way of knowing if the content of that appeal is accurate, but I know without question that four doctors from Central Hospital have died and 200 other medical workers are currently admitted as patients at hospitals all around the city. Based on those figures alone, I wonder if the secretary and director of Central Hospital even deserve to still be in charge. I’m quite confident that even without them, the rest of the hospital staff would still be able to carry on with their fight against the coronavirus. And so at this point I would like to say: if someone has to take the blame and resign, let’s start with the secretary and director of Central Hospital.

Actually, stepping down to resign is also a matter of common sense. Wouldn’t any reasonable person with a conscience resign if their negligence resulted in the deaths of numerous colleagues? Wouldn’t they want to make up for their mistakes by trying to take actions to repair the damage they caused? But in reality, it is very difficult to find people in China willing to step up and do this. We have a lot of people who understand all kinds of big, abstract theories, but none of them have basic common sense. Sometimes when it comes to these most fundamental concepts, they are a blank, completely lost. It is similar to us listening to those officials give speeches or reading those government directives in the newspaper; it is often torturous enough just to get through it, but in the end we still have no idea what the main point was. Even when there is a clear theme, most of it is usually bullshit anyway. But there are so many commonsense issues that get buried under the dense language of those big concepts; it is hard for even a sliver of common sense to dig itself out from all of that. But these kernels of common sense remain absolutely essential for us.

Yesterday when I was writing about Dr. Yuen Kwok-Yung’s interview, the term “soft intelligence” came up. I think scientists should place more emphasis on soft intelligence. Actually, it’s not just scientists who could benefit from this; people like hospital and government administrators should also start paying more attention to “soft intelligence.” I started wearing a face mask when I went outside way back on January 18; I even told our housekeeper to wear one when she goes shopping. Why is that, you ask? It’s because I had gotten a lot of “soft intelligence” from the people around me, telling me to be extra careful. A shame, then, that our government officials, who are responsible for the lives of millions of people, didn’t exert an ounce of caution. They continued on with their concerts and other mass events all the way up until January 21. Even after Dr. Zhong Nanshan made the announcement on the 20th saying that the virus could indeed spread via human-to-human contact, they still carried on with their big concert! My colleague YL told me what happened to a group of her cinematographer friends; four of them were assigned to shoot the performance at the Tian Han Theater; three members of that team later died from the coronavirus. If the government had informed the public earlier, if they had canceled performances like this one, perhaps we could have saved a lot of lives? So how come everyday people were already taking precautions, while our leaders just ignorantly carried on with business as usual? It is due to a lack of common sense. Their idea of common sense is rooted in a political notion of the term, while our idea of common sense is rooted in life experience.

Today there is an essay being forwarded like crazy on the internet. The title of the article is “The Fourth Round of the Shirking Responsibility Summit Meeting Opens in Wuhan.” Part of the essay mentioned a telephone meeting that was held by the National Health Commission’s Division of Disease Prevention on January 14. I asked my friend to check if this really happened and, indeed, there is a record. There is an article from that date entitled “In Deploying Preventive Measures Against the Infectious Novel Coronavirus, the National Health Commission Holds a Nationwide Tele-Conference.” Here are two paragraphs from that story:

During the meeting it was pointed out that there is currently a high level of uncertainty regarding methods to control this outbreak. Although the outbreak is currently limited to the city of Wuhan, we have still yet to discover the source of this novel coronavirus, nor have we fully grasped its method of transmission. We still need to keep strict watch in order to ascertain its potential for human-to-human spread. Since the Thailand Ministry of Health [12] The first cases of the novel coronavirus outside China were reported in Thailand on January 13, 2020. has confirmed several cases from Wuhan, efforts to control the outbreak have undergone considerable change; the spread of the virus may rapidly increase, especially with the onset of spring, and we cannot rule out the possibility of its spreading to other regions. We also cannot rule out the possibility that it could spread outside China into other countries. There is a need to prepare for worst-case scenario possibilities and increase our risk awareness; in terms of risk management, even if a given outcome is highly improbable we need to proceed as if it is the most likely outcome; we need to research the protective measures being used against the outbreak in the areas being affected by the outbreak; we must promptly figure out the most effective means of dealing with what might possibly be a new disease outbreak.

The meeting requests that the direction we take on a national level to control the outbreak follow the lead taken in Wuhan in terms of preventive measures. Hubei Province and the city of Wuhan need to adopt strict control measures with an emphasis on regulating produce markets and close monitoring for individuals with a fever; temperature monitoring stations and hospital clinics admitting patients with flu-like symptoms will be two important lines of defense. We need to increase supervision at various events, decrease large-scale public events where people gather, remind patients with fever-like symptoms not to leave Wuhan, bolster treatment plans for patients, and monitor those people who have had close contact with patients. We must implement the strictest measures and take a resolute stance to limit the outbreak to one location and do everything in our power to prevent the further spread of the virus within Wuhan. [13] “In Deploying Preventive Measures Against the Infectious Novel Coronavirus, the National Health Commission Holds a Nation-wide Tele-Conference” (“Guojia weisheng jiankangwei zhaokai quanguo dianshi dianhua huiyi bushu xinxing guanzhuang bingdu ganran feiyan fangkong gongzuo”) published online by the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China on January 14, 2020. http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/fkdt/202002/e5e8a132ef8b42d484e6df53d4d110c1.shtml .