Shanghai From a Window in the Hostel, by Marek (CC BY-ND 2.0)

© Josh Rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source.

Delete the article "Disciplined Wuhan Doctor Infected by Patient 11 Days Later, Now in Isolation Ward." (January 28, 2020) [Chinese]

The article, archived at CDT Chinese, was a written interview by the Beijing Youth Daily with an anonymous Wuhan doctor, one of eight disciplined in early January for spreading rumors about the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. Wuhan authorities had trumpeted their punishment of eight then-unidentified rumormongers, but the revelation this week that they were all medical personnel has helped fuel a public backlash at official handling of the outbreak. In the Beijing Youth Daily interview, the doctor says that he had warned a WeChat group of former medical school classmates about seven patients from a local wet market, suffering from what he at first described erroneously as SARS. Despite his requests for discretion, screenshots were reposted on social media, and the doctor was summoned to a police station and forced to confess his error and pledge not to repeat it. Soon afterwards, he fell ill after treating an infected patient, and was admitted to an isolation ward, where he awaited test results to support a formal diagnosis. He described his own symptoms, the situation in the hospital, and his parents’ less severe infections.

At least one doctor treating victims of the infection has died after contracting the disease himself. At CNN, Julia Hollingsworth, Yuli Yang and Natalie Thomas examined the strain on Wuhan’s overwhelmed medics:

Over the past few days, CNN has spoken to patients, medical staff and experts who have told of delays in testing for the virus, in telling the public the true nature of the virus’ spread, and of an already overburdened health system creaking under the enormous weight of a rapidly expanding outbreak.

[…] According to a nurse in Wuhan who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions, staff are overwhelmed, resources are running low, and there are no beds. There are so few hazmat suits that staff disinfect them at the end of their shift to wear again the next day, she said. Around 30 of the 500 medical staff at her hospital are now sick and admitted to hospital, and others — including her — have self-quarantined at home.

"There really are a lot of people who can’t get admitted, but there’s no point in blaming the nurses. There are no beds, no resources. Are we supposed to just fight this battle bare-handed?" she said. "Right now, loads of medical staff are at breaking point … I see my sisters charging toward the front line and I feel so powerless." [Source]

South China Morning Post’s Tracy Qu highlighted the Beijing Youth Daily article’s deletion on Tuesday, noting widespread criticism of local authorities’ handling of the outbreak, and quoting one Weibo response to the interview: "how lucky is this society to have such a good doctor! How terrible is this society to put such a good doctor in such a situation!" Elsewhere, SCMP’s Jun Mai reported criticism of the eight doctors’ treatment endorsed by central judicial authorities:

In an article published on the Supreme People’s Court’s social media account, a Beijing-based judge said that while the information shared in the group was not accurate, it should have been tolerated.

“It might have been a fortunate thing if the public had believed the ‘rumour’ then and started to wear masks and carry out sanitisation measures, and avoid the wild animal market,” the judge said, referring to a market believed to be the source of the outbreak in Wuhan.

[…] “To punish any information not totally accurate is neither legally necessary nor technically possible.

“It … undermines the credibility of the government and chips away at public support for the Communist Party. It could even be used by hostile overseas forces as an excuse to criticise us.”

The court also acknowledged that the country’s judicial system had no say over punishments by local police, but it felt obliged to share its thinking of “rumours”. [Source]

In an op-ed at The New York Times on Thursday, Ian Johnson wrote that the identification of the accused rumormongers as medical staff had indeed helped undermine public trust in the authorities, as the Supreme People’s Court article warned. Johnson argued that officials’ awareness of this broader trust deficit was the driving force behind the "dramatic action" previously critiqued this week by Da Shiji at China Media Project.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders reports that punishments like those condemned by the Supreme People’s Court article have been widespread:

[…] CHRD has documented 254 cases of netizens penalized by authorities for “spreading rumours” about the coronavirus emergency between January 22-28 (full list in Chinese only). These cases have been reported on by Chinese media, including from local authorities’ announcements, but not independently verified. The majority of the individuals involved in these cases reportedly received administrative detentions ranging between 3-15 days. Some also received fines, verbal warnings, forced “education,” and forced confessions. Shandong Provincial authorities announced on January 27 that they had investigated and punished 123 individuals for sending “malicious rumours,” in an indication of the scale of police operations outside Hubei.

[…] China’s invasive digital surveillance system has been deployed by police to silence netizens and reinforce information controls. On social media sites, netizens reported being visited, detained, or penalized by police for “spreading rumours” after they posted comments on the outbreak, and in some cases, for volunteering in distributing face masks and other supplies. Several human rights defenders have reported being visited by police and threatened with criminal sanctions unless they stopped sharing international news reporting or tweeting information about the outbreak. […]

[…] Police across the country have visited activists and lawyers to threaten them into silence about the government’s handling of the virus outbreak. Guangzhou-based disbarred lawyer Sui Muqing received threats from police for posting information online; artist Wang Zang and his family have been harassed by police in Yunnan; Hunan activist Chen Siming reported being hauled into a police station and forced to delete tweets and promise to stop tweeting; and Changsha police seized Fan Junyi for sharing foreign media reports. Reportedly, Hubei resident Gao Fei has gone missing after posting a video message about police closing in on him and about ways to contact and help local residents in need of assistance. Gao had reported about the outbreak first-hand on social media and distributed face masks in local communities. [Source]

The case of the doctor in the Beijing Youth Daily interview has revived scrutiny of the supposed privacy of closed WeChat groups, which operator Tencent has previously claimed it has "neither the authority nor reason to look at."

The 8 people detained for "spreading rumours" about the #coronavirus were all doctors.

Veteran journo Wang Zhian doubts that other doctors would have dobbed them in.

So who reported them? How did the cops know what was posted in private WeChat groups?https://t.co/nwudqinn5U

— Fergus Ryan (@fryan) January 30, 2020

Also on Twitter, The University of Chicago’s Dali Yang wrote that the treatment of the eight doctors showed "the costs of stability at all costs":

[…] Official news reports of the time say that the Wuhan police wanted to remind people it would be unrelenting in dealing with those who concoct and spread rumors […]. This news item was prominently carried on China Central TV and major outlets as well as online. It had a chilling effect on those who saw the early signs of a then emerging epidemic. This crackdown was clearly part of a coordinated effort by the Wuhan leadership. [….] Imagine the Wuhan authorities had acted on the information from these professional doctors to contain the emerging epidemic rather than punishing them. Alas, this is one more example of the growing costs of the Chinese leadership’s preoccupation with stability maintenance. For background on this: Dali L. Yang, “China’s Troubled Quest for Order: Leadership, Organization and the Contradictions of the Stability Maintenance Regime.” [Source]

Hosting a discussion on how "the pitfalls of normalizing China’s shortcomings" in the Chinese Storytellers newsletter this week, Caixin’s Dave Yin highlighted Chinese media’s achievements in reporting on the outbreak in the face of strict official controls.

Besides the rising infection numbers and death tolls, Chinese media have managed to publish pieces on fears raised by SARS experts; city-wide quarantines; disputes over origins of the virus; evacuation measures by foreign governments; the deaths of officials due to infection; authorities seemingly breaking ranks to deflect blame; medical supply shortages; ensuing government acknowledgment, and more.

And of course, who could forget the fact that reporters have found ways to document ground zero, namely Wuhan, Hubei province, a city under quarantine?

It’s uncommon for so much critical coverage to be available to the Chinese audience. Some observers have taken this as an indication that the Chinese government has allowed transparent discussions of this latest crisis.

But what these observers ignore is that authorities also detained those who first discussed the then-mysterious disease for “spreading rumors,” and censor their views even now. [Wuhan authorities now say that the eight were not detained, merely "educated and reprimanded."] State media, a key source of information for many in China, continue to downplay the story well after its impact was established. Some say this delay in public awareness aided the spread of 2019-nCoV.

What is “transparent” for China is not very transparent at all. [Source]

Another directive obtained by CDT this week ordered websites to "delete the Sanlian Life Week article ‘How will China’s Economy be Impacted if the WHO Gets Involved With the Coronavirus Epidemic?’ Do not continue republishing commentary." The WHO did formally declare the outbreak a "global emergency" on Thursday.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, coronavirus, Directives from the Ministry of Truth, diseases, doctors, epidemics, medical system, medical treatment, WeChat, wuhan

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Wuhan, Hubei–the epicenter of the outbreak of novel coronavirus that has now been declared a global health emergency by the WHO–has been on lockdown for nearly a week. The  “dramatic action” of quarantining a city of 11 million just ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday transit period was initially applauded by WHO officials as a sign China’s resolve to contain the virus, but also noted to be “new to science,” and criticized by experts for potentially inviting further risk. Over a dozen nearby cities followed Wuhan’s lead, and the general inconvenience and lack of health preparations added fuel to public anger over the official response to the outbreak. Additional concerns have been reported that a large portion of Wuhan’s population fled the city just before the lockdown, potentially bringing with them a virus confirmed to travel by air and be transmittable before symptoms develop.

On January 24, Douban user DiWeiYa (地味鸭) shared an account from inside the sealed city. The account, translated in full by CDT, describes the initial confusion that followed sparse official information on the emerging illness earlier this month, and frustration at the lack of official emergency preparations:

Notes from the Lockdown

Today is January 24, 2020, Lunar New Year’s Eve. It’s also Day Two of Wuhan’s lockdown. 

I don’t really have the right to comment on the events surrounding the lockdown. Because I haven’t fully recovered, I’ve been relying on my partner to go out and get me food and medicine. I’ve been at home recuperating for days now. I’m completely reliant, like a penguin dad, on my partner to scout the situation, then come home and repay me with news and material things. I’m not deeply engaged with the situation of Wuhan’s epidemic and lockdown, but I do know from experience something about the period of time after the outbreak began but before the public knew about it.

At the end of December 2019, a friend told me that “SARS” may have come to Wuhan via a wild animal at the Huanan Seafood Market. I moved to Wuhan just three months ago, and I’m still lost in this vast city and its Three Towns. I had no idea where the Huanan Seafood Market is. I think this story was spread by those eight friends, who are probably medical professionals. Now that they’ve received a government summons and seen the outbreak of the virus, are they still OK?

After the secular New Year’s Day, my partner and I saw the official news on the virus, and that the eight rumor-mongers had been dealt with. My partner rushed out and bought two boxes of N95 face masks. Aren’t regular masks good enough, I asked? I think we still have some at home. Not good enough, he said gravely, the N95 is specially designed to prevent viral infection. Those two boxes cost more than 300 yuan. That purchase hurt. Besides the virus, I was preoccupied in those first weeks of January with my family back home. As the sun set on January 8, a relative back in Jiangsu passed away. I bought a train ticket for home right away. It’s tough to find a ticket at the end of the year, all I could get was a seat on the high-speed train from Hankou Station for the morning of the ninth. Before I left, my partner nagged me nonstop to wear a face mask. The N95 was really uncomfortable. Is it OK if I don’t wear it? I asked. The news says the virus isn’t bad. He still made me wear it. I got on the subway and noticed that I was the only person in the entire car wearing a face mask. People sized me up with a weird look. At Hankou, I took off my mask at security for the face ID. Hankou has started using electronic tickets. This was my first time scanning my face for the train, and it certainly felt novel. There were an endless number of people walking around the station, and not one of them was wearing a face mask. Hankou hadn’t asked passengers to wear masks. They hadn’t set up temperature checkpoints, either. I started to wonder if my partner was making a big deal out of nothing. After all, the news said the virus was “preventable and controllable” and that it “doesn’t spread person-to-person,” and the number of new cases was minuscule. It was stuffy on the train and it felt hard to breathe, so I took off my mask and didn’t put it back on until I left the station. My relatives asked if it was bad in Wuhan. From the reports they heard it seemed like it wasn’t a big deal. I told them that I hadn’t seen anyone wearing masks on the way over. After the funeral, I went back to Hankou Station on the 12th. On Subway Line 2 I was once again the only freak wearing a mask. I hadn’t been examined at any point along my journey from Wuhan to my hometown and back, and my trip went without a hitch.

On the 14th, I started sneezing and had a runny nose. I didn’t know that this novel coronavirus has a latent period. I figured I had just caught a cold from being around so many people back home. I was busy preparing an article for publication, but I didn’t feel well and my progress was slow. My partner followed the news every day, but no new cases were reported. I told him they can nip this one in the bud, that it wouldn’t spread too far. On the 17th I had a fever, but we didn’t have a thermometer at home. My partner felt my forehead and said I was hot. He went out to buy a thermometer and a fever reducer. The drugstore gave him a crappy electronic thermometer that comes free with a purchase. The numbers weren’t even accurate. I took the Ibuprofen and went to bed. When I got up on the 18th, my fever was gone. 

I told my partner I was fine, but he insisted on taking me to the hospital. In the afternoon, I spiked a fever again. We packed our things, put on our N95s and walked to the closest Grade A [top tier, 三级甲等医院 in China’s classification system] hospital. I checked in and they took my temperature. There was a man with a high fever who just up and left as soon as they had taken his temperature. The nurse asked the doctor if the man had checked in. The doctor said no, he wasn’t able to check in. Then the doctor told me I only had a slight fever, and wrote my temperature in my chart. Then a petite female doctor asked for my medical history and berated me for not keeping a detailed record of my temperature. When she found out that I’d been to Hankou, she wrote down “was at Hankou Station, in vicinity of Huanan Seafood Market.” I looked up the map and saw that Hankou is just 800 meters from Huanan. The doctor took a throat culture and sent me to have my blood drawn and get a CT scan. The CT doctor asked me to wait because the person before me had a problem, and they were sterilizing the area. I waited 90 minutes for them to finish. I still don’t know what the “problem” was. I was out of it from my fever, and didn’t hear the radiologist’s instructions clearly. When my scan and report were finally done, they indicated that I tested negative for H1N1 and H2N2. The ER doctor muttered over my CT scan for a while, then made a phone call to register my name and age. She gave me some Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and a cephalosporin and sent me home. By now the ER was overcrowded. A bunch of feverish patients surrounded the doctors. Lots of people weren’t wearing masks. Some of the doctors and nurses wore N95s. Others wore two-layered surgical masks. The doctors in the crowd were angry and agitated. “This is serious!” They yelled. “This situation is serious! Please, mind your hygiene and line up single-file…”

I left the hospital and said to my partner, looks like I don’t have it! The doctor didn’t say I do. He snorted, “She didn’t say you don’t, either!” I opened my chart. Sure enough, there wasn’t any diagnosis, just my history and a description of my symptoms. I went home and took my medicine, and felt a bit better. Three days later, my partner went back to the hospital with my CT scan. This time there were more than twice as many people waiting to be seen. The doctor looked at the scan and said maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Unless a large area of my lungs were affected, it was impossible to diagnose based on the CT scan alone. They needed to run a reagent box [serologic test] to be sure. My partner asked if they had any reagent boxes. No, they hadn’t gotten any yet, the office above them hadn’t sent them yet. My partner asked if that meant I couldn’t have been properly diagnosed in the first place? If I was getting better after being on medication for three days, it’s fine, the doctor replied. If I wasn’t getting better, I could have the novel pneumonia and would have to stay at the hospital. But their beds were all taken, so I’d have to go find another hospital.

Up until this point, I had no choice but to believe that the doctors truly didn’t know whether or not I had the novel pneumonia virus when they examined me on the 18th. Days before, the news reported that a huge batch of reagent boxes were being put to use. So how come an official Grade A hospital couldn’t get any? The government had made it clear that there were only several hundred [confirmed] cases and that they doubted there were many more beyond that, so why were the beds filled at a hospital that was not specifically designated to handle the outbreak? I clearly could be infected, so why didn’t they tell me and my partner to quarantine ourselves? They made it clear that this was preventable and controllable and not spread person-to-person, so how come that turned out to be a big fat lie? I don’t know the answers to these questions. All I could do was keep taking my medicine.

A senior classmate of mine told me that at this point I should leave Wuhan and go back home to Jiangsu. But the generation before me is old and frail. What if I really did have coronavirus and infected them? It was too horrible to contemplate. My partner and I each texted our parents to explain why he had decided to stay in Wuhan for Lunar New Year, and we returned our train tickets. At this point I knew that the epidemic was far worse than what the government was saying. I started making daily orders of vegetables, eggs, and frozen meat to stockpile, filling our kitchen to capacity. On the evening of the 22nd, someone in one of my [WeChat] groups asked, “Is it true that Wuhan is on lockdown?” I thought that was unlikely. I took my medicine and went to sleep. When I woke up the next day, my phone was blowing up with group messages about the lockdown.

My partner saw that I was awake and told me that he saw the news early in the morning and had already made several grocery runs, mainly for instant noodles, crackers, and other convenience food, as well as several tanks of mineral water. Then he rushed out again to buy Tamiflu and Ibuprofen. He also snatched the last of the [rubbing] alcohol, and he bought me a new kind of hamburger from McDonald’s. As I ate my burger I scrolled through Douban, where I learned that medical personnel couldn’t move their cars to get to work. And how hard it must be for people who live far away now that the city’s public transportation was completely shut down. We have enough supplies at home, and enough face masks. We’re conveniently located–everything we could need is nearby. And I have my partner and my cat. Most importantly, I’ve already gotten better. I don’t have to risk waiting in line all day, and I don’t have to grovel for a hospital bed. How lucky I am compared to other patients, their families, and medical workers.

Our great good luck in this unlucky time was all thanks to my partner’s vigilance and strong-arming, and to my pessimism and penchant for hoarding. I could have had coronavirus after all, my partner reasoned, but a mild case that my immune system could handle. Or perhaps it was regular pneumonia, and the medicine helped me to slowly recover. What exactly I had, I’ll probably never know. If I could do it again, I would never have taken off my mask on the train, no matter how much I suffered.

My partner and I are stuck in Wuhan, holed up in the sick city, with no idea how worried our families are. My dad and my partner’s parents both canceled their new year’s plans and are glued to the news on the epidemic. The face masks I bought my dad have already arrived, and I’m urging him to get some medicine. In the evening I got a notice from my work that our logistics department has made thorough preparations to ensure a constant supply of fresh food and other goods. While I’m grateful for this, I can’t help but wonder: if my workplace can guarantee the supply and safety of its employees, why can’t our esteemed city government ensure that the staff at a top hospital are fed and rested, or even that they have enough protective gear?

Today is Lunar New Year’s Eve. I’m already recovered, except for a bit of a cough. I heard that the CCTV gala will have a celebrity host recite a poem about the city fighting coronavirus. I really can’t watch that forced, maudlin pageant, and I can’t think about how long this siege will go on. All I can do is keep my nose in a book. The cat is happy, bouncing around everywhere. She’s the only one who isn’t worried. Misery has never been a stranger to this patch of earth. Generation after generation, we silently bear it. My story isn’t important. I’m only writing it down to remind myself: do not forget, do not forget. [Chinese]

See also journalist and longtime Wuhan resident Da Shiji’s essay from inside the lockdown at China Media Project, where he recalls how politics and stability maintenance took precedent in Wuhan authorities’ initial response, or CNN’s multimedia report on how Wuhan residents are coping.

Translation by Anne Henochowicz.

© Josh Rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coronavirus, Netizen Voices, public health, wuhan

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source.

All websites delete the Sanlian Life Week article “How will China’s Economy be Impacted if the WHO Gets Involved With the Coronavirus Epidemic?” Do not continue republishing commentary. (January 29, 2020) [Chinese]

The article, published by state-owned weekly news magazine Sanlian Life Week (三联生活周刊), examined the potential economic impact that could follow the World Health Organization’s declaration of the Wuhan coronavirus (reported as “pneumonia epidemic” 肺炎疫情 throughout the article) to be a “global health emergency.” After looking at economic data from 2003, when the WHO declared SARS a global emergency, the article notes that the current economic situation could mean a harder hit this time. The report says the WHO has only applied that label to five other health situations over the past decade, and is very cautious before doing so. If the WHO declares an emergency, it will likely come with more China-focused travel warnings and import/export prohibitions from other nations. CDT Chinese has archived the article, and CDT will publish a full translation later this week.

The WHO refrained from declaring the coronavirus a global emergency last week, noting that while it is an emergency within China there is not enough information about it to declare a global crisis, adding that the decision could come with appropriate evidence. Since then, WHO officials have applauded China’s “unprecedented” decision to lock down 11 million people in Wuhan as a signal of its commitment to containing the virus, but also noted that this approach is “new to science.” (Other health experts have criticized the lockdown, which over a dozen other nearby cities also enacted, as inviting more risk.) In a press conference on Wednesday, the WHO warned that all governments should “take action” to prevent the virus as it continues to spread globally, and announced that another emergency meeting of experts will convene on Thursday to assess the global situation.

The current death toll in China is 132, with nearly 6,000 infected. While China has been more transparent about the outbreak than they were ahead of the SARS crisis in 2002-2003, local authorities in Wuhan were slow to give the situation proper priority, and central authorities are maintaining a tight leash on the narrative currently–leading to much public and online outrage in China.

© Josh Rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, coronavirus, public health, world health organization

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh