One day. Two deaths. A year later, despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths that follow, the loss of two people – one in China and one in the United States – still resonates in two countries where the pandemic has followed drastically different paths.
On Saturday, the anniversary of the death of dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan, China due to the illness he sounded the alarm about, before being silenced by the authorities there.
At the end of December 2019, dr. Li warned his medical school classmates in an online chat room about a laboratory report of a spreading virus resembling the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, a coronavirus that had spread from China 17 years earlier. . Shortly afterwards, he was called in the middle of the night by health officials and later by the police and forced to sign a statement rejecting his ‘illegal behavior’. Without naming Dr Li, Chinese television news reported that eight people in Wuhan were 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 revolt online in China, flooding Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform similar to Twitter, with an illustration of him being muzzled by a barbed wire mask.
Although its initial warning was not heeded, China reversed its course and shut down Wuhan, warning the world in advance of the dangers of the virus. A year later, far from the long months of hard locks, the city awaits when the virus is under control: unmasked faces, joyful gatherings and daily commutes.
The commemoration of the death of Dr. Li early on February 7 in China (and February 6 in the United States) inspired an outpouring of online messages in China, including many people warning that the lessons from his persecution should not be forgotten. Many left comments, some with emoticons lit by candles, on Dr. Li’s personal page on Weibo.
“So many people have visited here to thank you,” reads one message. “We must not forget,” said another, a sentiment echoed by many other comments.
On Sunday in China, comments were made with a hashtag commemorating Dr. Li was created, attracted more than 410 million views on Weibo, and – even with censorship – held much longer posts aimed at the official censorship and secrecy that led to his punishment.
Some grieving dr. Li quoted his own words in an interview days before his death: “I think a healthy society should not have just one voice.”
Saturday is also 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 controlled.
On February 6, 2020, weeks before there was evidence that the coronavirus was spreading in American communities, Patricia Dowd, an otherwise healthy 57-year-old auditor at a semiconductor manufacturer in Silicon Valley, developed many symptoms and died suddenly in her kitchen. in San Jose, California. The surprising discovery months later that her death was due to Covid-19 rewrote the timeline of the early spread of the virus in the United States and suggested that the optimistic assumptions that drove federal policy during the early weeks of the outbreak misplaced is. .
‘RIP Patricia,’ ‘Pam Foley, a member of the San Jose City Council, who Ms. Dowd’s district represents, posted on Twitter on Saturday. “You are loved and deeply missed.”
A year and more than 460.00 deaths later, approximately 1.3 million people in the United States receive a dose of vaccination every day and the spread of the virus eventually decreases, but the threat of more infectious variants lies ahead. A return to normalcy remains a pursuit, but only that, an idea that is far from reality.