I got a phone call from Dr Song* one night. He had just finished a shift at a hospital in Wuhan and was about to go back to work again. He told me it had been weeks since he had had a full night of sleep or a day off. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spent time with his family or eaten a warm meal. At work, he wraps himself in raincoats due to a lack of protective gear across the hospital. Some of his colleagues wear diapers to work to avoid having to remove their protective suits.
“Maybe you can write something to let the patients know we have all tried our best,” he said. Just a few hours before, when a patient had died at a Wuhan hospital, family members had beaten up and severely injured two doctors. Even though he and his coworkers were working non-stop – overwhelmed, under-equipped and exhausted – they still faced a backlash from patients, many of whom he had to reject due to the lack of hospital beds. Some left disappointedly. Others abused him.
I got to know Song when I was helping a medical supplies donation group. He was not the only one pleading for help via social media – I was contacted by dozens of medical workers, who all described a desperate situation. I also received a lot of pleas for help from patients. They had been waiting in packed hospital lobbies for days, in fear of being left untested, untreated and ultimately dying from what is now officially called Covid-19. Some people had felt ill for almost a week, and in that time, their family members had started to feel ill as well. But they had a long wait to be diagnosed and treated.
Lin*, a college student, started to feel light-headed and thought she had caught a cold – at the time, there was still no official information about the coronavirus outbreak – but her condition deteriorated drastically. The ban on local transport meant that she and her mother had to walk for hours to get to the hospital. She waited in the lobby for an entire night, then was given some medicine and advised to come back the next day in case there were coronavirus testing kits available.
She was diagnosed at the end of January. So was her mother, who was infected while taking care of her. They were told again and again to remain confined at home and wait to be taken to hospital. As time went by, her messages seemed more and more depressed. One night, she told me that she felt like she was waiting to die. The last time we spoke, she was back at the hospital, waiting again: “If there is only one bed, I will let my mother take it. Her health is declining rapidly. I will quarantine myself at home.” She couldn’t stop crying.
Lin is not alone. On Weibo, one of the biggest social media platforms in China, there is a group of more than 150,000 people – mostly patients and their families – asking for help. Reading through the posts, it’s clear there is a shortage of everything. Many people have to decide whether to prioritise their mother or daughter, grandson or grandfather, wife or husband.
Knowing how both medical workers and patients are struggling, I couldn’t stop thinking about what caused all these tragedies in a country that should have learned a lot from its Sars outbreak 17 years ago.
According to the Financial Times, there was at least a three-week period when Wuhan authorities were aware the virus was spreading but “issued orders to suppress the news”. In early January, eight medical professionals were reprimanded by the police for rumour-mongering, including Dr Li Wenliang – the whistleblower who died from the disease – who has become a symbol of public frustration over the Chinese government’s censorship and poor management. These “rumours” were actually based on infection cases in hospitals in Wuhan, and if the government had instead put its energy into investigating these cases, then lives could have been saved.
In mid-January, a nurse told me that medical workers in Wuhan had been advised to not wear protective gear to avoid causing panic. Later, Song told me that medical workers had been advised not to appeal for help on public media outlets. Now 1,700 medical workers nationwide have been infected.
Even now, when the virus has made 70,000 people sick and taken more than 1,700 lives, the government is still trying to hide information. Thousands of posts were deleted from the online group asking for help, including Lin’s. I was told by editors of Chinese media outlets that I couldn’t write about anything that reflected negatively on the government.
It is not new for figures in government to put their political interests ahead of public health. But given the rapid spread of the virus and the gravity of the situation in China, I thought the government could put aside the censorship and propaganda for a while. I was wrong.
* Dr Song and Lin are pseudonyms