Lu, 57, spent three days on the phone trying to find a hospital bed for her 83-year-old father in Wuhan. She called emergency hotlines, the city government, hospitals and neighborhood committees. She pulled every connection she had. He died of the coronavirus on a Monday in early February.
“There are 10,000 people trying to get 1,000 beds. How can you get one?” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve never felt so hopeless, seeing my mom and dad with no way to be treated.”
Her father had fallen sick in early January, when officials were still saying the virus did not spread between humans. By the end he was struggling to breathe and bleeding internally. Her mother, 80, is quarantined alone with a high fever, and her sister is also ill. Lu would not give her full name.
“The media are so beautiful, everyone thinks I’m making up rumors online,” she said of state reports about open beds and patient hotlines. When friends forwarded them, she wrote back: “It doesn’t exist.”
The doctor who warned first
Public anger got a face when Dr. Li Wenliang died early on a Friday in a Wuhan hospital. He was 34. He had sent warnings about a deadly virus on social media in December, and he was one of eight people arrested for spreading rumors. Authorities conceded only the week before that he and the others should not have been censured.
Conflicting accounts of his condition circulated first. Early reports of his death were retracted when the hospital said it was still working to save him. Hours later he was officially declared dead. He left a wife and a child.
“It’s not so important to me if I’m vindicated or not,” Li had told the Chinese publication Caixin from a quarantine room. “What’s more important is that everyone knows the truth.”
Chinese internet users called him a hero, a victim and a martyr, and demanded apologies from those who had detained him. Within an hour of his death, the Weibo topic “Wuhan government owes Dr. Li Wenliang an apology” was censored.
Numbers and shortages
At the time, confirmed infections in China had passed 30,000 and were rising by thousands. More than 630 people had died, and there were reports of sick Hubei residents who died untested and so went uncounted. About 50 million people were under lockdown.
Journalists and online activists accused government-backed charities in Hubei of mishandling donated medical equipment and diverting masks to private groups and officials. Reports also spread of local officials seizing each other’s supplies. Officials in Dali were said to have tried to intercept a mask shipment bound for Chongqing, and in Qingdao, officials reportedly ordered customs to seize masks meant for Shenyang. The LA Times said fan clubs for celebrities had coordinated donations more efficiently than the official organizations.
Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, said the crisis could cost President Xi Jinping something that cannot be measured in case counts. “Xi Jinping is a leader who has led, and not unsuccessfully, I can say, by control,” Schell said. “And now he’s confronting something he cannot control.”
Lu said Wuhan had gone quiet. “There are no people outside, and no sounds. It’s never been so quiet.”
