One day. Two dead. A year later, despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed, the loss of two people – one in China and one in the United States – still reverberates in two countries where the pandemic took drastically different paths.
Saturday is the anniversary of Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan, China, over the illness he had raised the alarm about before he was silenced by authorities there.
In late December 2019, Dr. Li warned his medical school classmates in an online chat room about a lab report about a spreading virus resembling Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, a coronavirus that had spread from China 17 years earlier. . Shortly afterwards, he was subpoenaed in the middle of the night by health officials and later by the police, and forced to sign a statement denying his “illegal behavior.” Without Dr. Li, Chinese state television reported that eight people in Wuhan had been punished for spreading “rumors” about the virus.
Dr. Li was 34 and was expecting a second child with his wife. His silence and death sparked rare waves of anger and rebellion online in China, flooding Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform similar to Twitter, with an image of him muzzled through a barbed wire mask.
Although his initial warning was not heeded, China reversed course, shut down Wuhan and warned the world of the dangers of the virus. A year later, far away from the long months of harsh incarceration, the city shows what lies ahead once the virus is under control: unmasked faces, joyful gatherings and daily commutes.
The anniversary of Dr. Li early February 7 in China (and February 6 in the United States) sparked a flood of online reports in China, including many from people warning that the lessons of his persecution should not be forgotten. Many left comments, some with emoticons of lit candles, on Dr. Li on Weibo.
“So many people have come here to thank you,” said one message. “We shouldn’t forget,” said another, a feeling echoed by many other comments.
On Sunday in China, comments with a hashtag were made in memory of Dr. Li viewed more than 410 million times on Weibo, and – even with censorship – much longer posts focused on the official censorship and secrecy that led to his sentence.
Some grieving Dr. Li quoted his own words in an interview days before he died: “I think a healthy society shouldn’t have just one voice.”
Saturday has also been exactly a year since the first known coronavirus-related death in the United States, where a unified pandemic strategy never existed under the Trump administration and the virus was never monitored.
On February 6, 2020, weeks before there was evidence that the coronavirus was spreading in U.S. communities, Patricia Dowd, an otherwise healthy 57-year-old auditor at a Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturer, developed flu-like symptoms and died abruptly in her kitchen in San Jose, California The surprising discovery months later that her death was the result of Covid-19 rewrote the timeline of the virus’s early spread in the United States, suggesting that the optimistic assumptions driving federal policy in the early weeks of the outbreak were misplaced. goods .
“RIP Patricia”, Pam Foley, a San Jose City Council member representing Mrs. Dowd’s district, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “You are loved and deeply missed.”
A year and more than 460,000 deaths later, about 1.3 million people in the United States receive a vaccine dose every day and the spread of the virus is finally slowing, but the threat of more contagious variants looms. A return to normalcy remains an aspiration, but only that, an idea that is far from reality.