Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

That is from a meeting held on January 14! January 14! That is a full six days before Zhong Nanshan publicly stated that the virus was indeed possible to spread between people! That was a full nine days before the quarantine was imposed! The author of the article “The Fourth Round of the Shirking Responsibility Summit Meeting” is a man who works in engineering, and he really is quite the detective. He was quickly able to figure out exactly when that memo was first posted; in his essay he writes: “This article was posted online in February; sometime before February 21 since it was last edited on February 21 at 8:39 a.m. But the date listed for initial posting was revised to read January 14.” I find that very interesting.

It has now been verified that this document does indeed exist. This means that that meeting did indeed take place. This essay led to a lot of discussion in my classmates chat group. K commented by saying: “First of all, there must be a very large number of people who participated in this nationwide teleconference, so it would be very hard to fabricate details about it after the fact. If there had been any question as to the authenticity of the content, I’m sure that policymakers from the Hubei and Wuhan Health Commission offices would have taken issue with this report. Secondly, I wonder just who it was that ‘refreshed’ the content on the National Health Commission website? Who ordered them to do this? What was the actual process involved? Did someone just temporarily make a mistake and later corrected it? Or were some officials trying to ‘mend the fence after the sheep had escaped’? In actuality, the National Health Commission could leak an unofficial report of this meeting in any way they might choose in order to ensure that a correct record of the details got out. But it is a bit unimaginable that they would instead choose to use this rather secretive method. That’s because no one would ever claim that the National Health Commission’s forgetting to upload a meeting summary to their website was somehow responsible for the tragedy we are facing today in Wuhan. Should a summary of that meeting have been made public? Who decided that that meeting should be an internal session? And who decided that the content of that meeting should be withheld from the public?”

There are simply too many suspicious things about what happened. I figure that if it was a nationwide meeting, then there must have been officials from Hubei who also participated. Who from Hubei was on the line during this teleconference? And why didn’t they enact any of the suggested safety measures after that meeting? And why didn’t they share the content of that meeting with the media so that things could be made public? Instead, they did not take any of the recommended actions, like monitoring people with fevers, shutting down large-scale public events, reminding people with fever and flu-like symptoms not to leave Wuhan, limiting public gatherings, and taking other similar precautions. If they had made all that information public on January 14 and urged the public to take precautions, would Wuhan have had to endure such a terrible loss of human life? Would such a horrific catastrophe have still befallen us? Would the nation have suffered such heavy losses? If they already knew that the virus was spreading and that the consequences would be severe, then why didn’t they take action? Was it an intentional dereliction of duty, or were they simply being careless? Or were they simply ignorant? Did they think that everything would somehow straighten itself out after a few days? Whatever the case, I truly don’t understand what happened.

Reflection and responsibility are intricately interconnected. If we do not staunchly pursue those responsible for what happened, we will never be able to seriously reflect. At this stage in the outbreak, this is the single most pressing issue for us. We need to push forward with this now while we still remember everything that happened and all the details of the complete timeline are still fresh in our minds. And so I again call on our government to quickly establish an investigative committee to thoroughly examine the core reasons that allowed the coronavirus to spread and expand to the point that it could turn into the calamity that we are now all facing. At the same time, I recommend that all people in Wuhan who have writing skills start recording everything they have seen, heard, experienced, and felt since January. I also hope that amateur writers also establish working groups to seek out families who lost loved ones to the coronavirus in order to help them document what their family members went through in search of treatment and what they experienced before their death. They should set up a website where all these testimonials can be uploaded and categorized for convenient searching. If possible, print versions of these testimonials published in multiple volumes would also be an important contribution. Let all of us in Wuhan leave behind a collective memory of what happened. I promise to do my part in contributing whatever help I can muster to support this cause.

Today among the texts my doctor friend sent me, there was the following passage: “Nine million Wuhan residents along with one million people originally from outside the city have all been trapped here in Wuhan, there is still no accurate count of how many people originally from Wuhan are now stuck outside the city where they have been subjected to untold prejudice and discrimination while being unable to return home, more than 42,000 heroic warriors have traveled to Wuhan to support the efforts here, and there are 1.4 billion Chinese who have still been unable to get back to their normal lives; we are all utterly exhausted and at the point where we simply cannot take any more.”

Another doctor friend told me: “Based on what people who have been calling into our hotlines are saying, people’s biggest concern is now starting to shift from getting infected with the coronavirus to the question of when they will be able to get back to work and what protective steps will be put in place once they are back to work. As of now, most people are still unable to return to work, and many are currently unemployed. The massive economic pressure people are facing is causing a lot of anxiety. For some this will result in depression and even cases of mental breakdown.”

I pray that all these disasters may soon come to an end.

March 10, 2020

Remember, there is no such thing as victory here, there is only the end.

The weather is truly amazing today and the sun is shining brightly. All my colleagues are showing off photos of the flowers blooming in their courtyards; they are all glowing with beautiful colors. I’m reminded of the fact that I had originally bought an airplane ticket to Hainan island for February 6, and today was the day I was originally scheduled to return home. Because of the quarantine, I got stuck here and never made the trip. From the beginning of the outbreak until now, this is the first time that I truly feel like the difficult days are now behind us. All the temporary hospitals have now been completely decommissioned, and there are very few new reported cases of patients testing positive for the coronavirus; I think that we might be down to zero new cases in another one or two days. The horror is finally about to come to a close. But friend, please don’t you dare talk about this as being some kind of victory. Remember, there is no such thing as victory here, there is only the end.

I truly never imagined that the quarantine would last this long. I remember the last time I went to the pharmacy to pick up my medicine, thinking that a month’s supply would be more than enough; the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In the end, I had to go to the hospital to get my prescription refilled. I also had to deal with some hand issues during this lockdown. Several years back the palm of my hand split open; it took nearly a full year of treatment before it was back to normal. However, over the course of the past few days it started to open up again from the finger. Today my finger was in so much pain that it is affecting my ability to type, so I don’t think I’ll be able to write too much today.