Via The New Yorker, a must-read: How the Coronavirus Has Tested China’s System of Information Control. Excerpt:
Around 5 p.m. on December 30th, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates group on WeChat. He told them that “seven confirmed cases of sars” were in quarantine at the hospital, then followed up with a correction: it was an unspecified coronavirus, which later became known as 2019-nCoV. Li wasn’t authorized to share the information, but he wanted to warn his former classmates—mostly fellow-physicians—so that they would know to protect themselves. He asked them not to share the news outside the group, but soon the chat had spread—via screenshot, with Li’s name attached—throughout and beyond Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Li was irritated at first, but understanding.
Eight hours later, at one-thirty in the morning, Li received a phone call summoning him to the offices of the municipal health commission, where his superiors were attending an emergency conference; there, hospital leadership questioned him about the WeChat message. Later that day, while at work, Li was called to the “inspection section”—essentially a political arm of the hospital, which concerns itself with political transgressions, as opposed to professional ones—for more disciplinary meetings. On January 3rd, Li’s local police station called and informed him that he was required to sign and fingerprint an admonition letter for spreading “untrue speech.”
Meanwhile, CCTV, the primary state broadcaster, had reported that police had contacted eight people in Wuhan who had spread rumors about a new, sars-like strain of pneumonia. “The Internet is not a land outside the law,” the station warned its viewers.
The following week, Li treated a glaucoma patient who appeared to have an “unidentified pneumonia.” She had a fever, and a CT scan that showed telltale lesions on her lungs, known as ground-glass opacities. Several of the patient’s family members had begun showing symptoms similar to hers.
On January 10th, Li began coughing; he ran a fever the next day and was hospitalized, and was given a diagnosis of coronavirus. The general public was still largely unaware of any outbreak.
