Dr. Wenliang’s message went viral, becoming the earliest warning of what we now know today as Covid-19. He returned to work, but contracted Covid from a patient, and died on February 7, 2020.
Four years later, investigations about the virus’s origins aren’t going forward, largely due to China’s reluctance to facilitate a comprehensive investigation by the WHO, the World Health Organization. Beijing hesitates to provide access to critical raw data which would not only help to identify the exact cause of the virus but would also facilitate the preparation for future pandemics.
I’ve told this tale 3 years running now:
I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about “infectious pneumonia” in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).
Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.
They said, “it’s nothing, just a flu.”
The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, “no, it’s an exaggeration.”
The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.
Week 4, they told us they hadn’t heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.
I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…
I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.