A good movie plot involves a Cassandra-like figure warning humanity and doom ensuing when the warnings aren’t heeded. Coronaplague seems to fit this narrative perfectly. From New Yorker magazine (worldwide pandemic causing them to momentarily pause their all-Trump format?):
Around 5 p.m. on December 30th, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates group on WeChat. He told them that “seven confirmed cases of sars” were in quarantine at the hospital, then followed up with a correction: it was an unspecified coronavirus, which later became known as 2019-nCoV. Li wasn’t authorized to share the information, but he wanted to warn his former classmates—mostly fellow-physicians—so that they would know to protect themselves. He asked them not to share the news outside the group, but soon the chat had spread—via screenshot, with Li’s name attached—throughout and beyond Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Li was irritated at first, but understanding.
Eight hours later, at one-thirty in the morning, Li received a phone call summoning him to the offices of the municipal health commission, where his superiors were attending an emergency conference; there, hospital leadership questioned him about the WeChat message. Later that day, while at work, Li was called to the “inspection section”—essentially a political arm of the hospital, which concerns itself with political transgressions, as opposed to professional ones—for more disciplinary meetings. On January 3rd, Li’s local police station called and informed him that he was required to sign and fingerprint an admonition letter for spreading “untrue speech.
It was not until January 20th that President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.”
Why were the superiors “attending an emergency conference”? Was it possibly to investigate the same phenomenon that Li Wenliang had observed? If so, weren’t Chinese public health officials doing whatever it is they do to investigate an epidemic? The leader of the country didn’t issue a statement until three weeks later? Isn’t that close to the minimum time that we’d expect? In hindsight it seems obvious that this was going to be huge, but why would it be obvious immediately? (China had bird flu outbreaks in 2013. 2014, 2015, and 2017 that were scary, but ultimately proved to be insignificant; if the government had shut down the country sooner than the first three weeks of those flu outbreaks, it wouldn’t have been the right decision.)
If we’re going to use the benefit of hindsight, even if Li Wenliang’s message had gotten out to everyone in China and been believed, can we say with confidence that the country would have immediately taken drastic measures? European and North American countries didn’t take drastic measures, despite knowing everything that Li Wenliang was saying and a lot more, until thousands of people were surely infected.
U.S. Media loves to explain things with “China government bad”, but could what happened be explained just as easily with “Viruses are smarter than humans” combined with “Humans, especially when organized into large government bureaucracies, are not nimble”?
US would have treated Li Wenliang the same way, suppressed him because the patients weren’t the right skin color, he wasn’t the right political party, or he wanted to close a border. Not sure if the admonition letter he signed in US would be for spreading fake news or wanting to protect himself from certain patients though.
In a word-nope.
If his message got more play there would have simply been more ‘hug a Chinaman’ nonsense. Until the bodies hit the floor. And if the CDC didn’t spend so much time on gun control they might be better at infectious disease response.