One day. Two deaths. 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 has taken drastically different directions.
Saturday is the anniversary of Dr. Li Wenliang’s death in Wuhan, China, from the illness about which he had raised the alarm, before being silenced by local authorities.
In late December 2019, Dr. Li alerted his medical school colleagues in an online chat room about a laboratory report on the spread of a virus similar to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, a coronavirus that spread from China 17 years earlier. Shortly thereafter, he was summoned in the middle of the night by health workers and, later, by the police, and forced to sign a declaration disallowing his “illegal behavior”. Without mentioning Dr. Li’s name, the Chinese state television news reported that eight people in Wuhan were punished for spreading “rumors” about the virus.
Dr. Li was 34 years old and was expecting a second child with his wife. His silence and his death unleashed rare waves of fury and revolt online in China, flooding Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform similar to Twitter, with an illustration of him gagged by a barbed wire mask.
Although its initial warning was not heeded, China reversed the course, arresting Wuhan and offering the world a warning about the dangers of the virus. A year later, far from the long months of severe blockade, the city shows what awaits when the virus is contained: unmasked faces, happy encounters and daily trips.
The anniversary of Dr. Li’s death in early February 7 in China (and February 6 in the United States) inspired a flood of online messages in China, including many from people who warned that the lessons of his persecution should not be overlooked. . Many left comments, some with candle emoticons, on Dr. Li’s personal page on Weibo.
“So many people visited here to thank you,” said a message. “We must not forget,” said another, feeling echoed by many other comments.
On Sunday in China, comments with a hashtag created in memory of Dr. Li attracted more than 410 million views on Weibo and – even with censorship – many longer posts aimed at official censorship and the secrecy that led to his punishment.
Some in mourning, 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 is also exactly one year since the first known coronavirus-related death in the United States, where a unified pandemic strategy never existed under Trump’s administration and the virus was never controlled.
On February 6, 2020, weeks before there was evidence that the coronavirus was spreading in US communities, Patricia Dowd, a 57-year-old auditor at a semiconductor manufacturer in Silicon Valley, developed flu-like symptoms. and died abruptly in his kitchen in San Jose, California. The surprising discovery months after his death was from Covid-19 rewrote the timeline of the initial spread of the virus in the United States and suggested that the optimistic assumptions that drove federal policies in the first weeks of the outbreak were misplaced.
“Patricia RIP”, Pam Foley, San Jose City Council member who represents the Dowd district, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “You are loved and miss a lot”.
A year and more than 460,000 deaths later, about 1.3 million people in the United States are receiving a dose of vaccine every day and the spread of the virus is finally slowing, but the threat of more contagious variants is looming. The return to normality remains an aspiration, but only that, a notion that is far from reality.