On 30 December, after seeing several patients with flu-like symptoms and resistant to usual treatment methods, Ai received the lab results of one case, which contained the word: “Sars coronavirus.” Ai, reading the report several times, says she broke out into a cold sweat.
She circled the words Sars, took a photo and sent it to a former medical school classmate, now a doctor at another hospital in Wuhan. By that evening, the photo had spread throughout medical circles in Wuhan, where it was also shared by Li Wenliang, becoming the first piece of evidence of the outbreak.
That night Ai said she received a message from her hospital saying information about this mysterious disease should not be arbitrarily released in order to avoid causing panic. Two days later, she told the magazine, she was summoned by the head of the hospital’s disciplinary inspection committee and reprimanded for “spreading rumours” and “harming stability”.
The staff were forbidden from passing messages or images related to the virus, she said. All Ai could do was ask her staff to wear protective clothing and masks – even as hospital authorities told them not to. She told her department to wear protective jackets under their doctor coats.
“We watched more and more patients come in as the radius of the spread of infection became larger,” she said, as they began to see patients with no connection to the seafood market, believed to be the source of the first cases.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials were still insisting there was no reason to believe the virus was being passed between people. “I knew there must be human to human transmission,” Ai said.
On 21 January, the day after Chinese officials finally confirmed there was human to human transmission of the virus, the number of sick residents coming to the emergency room had already reached 1,523 in a day – three times the normal volume.
In the interview, Ai described moments that she will never forget: an elderly man staring blankly at a doctor giving him the death certificate of his 32-year-old son, or a father who was too sick to get out of the car outside of the hospital. By the time she walked to the car, he had died.
Once, when she arranged for the transfer of a man’s mother-in-law to in-patient care, the man took a moment to thank Ai. The mother-in-law died upon arrival. “I know it was only a few seconds but that ‘thank you’ weighs heavily on me. In the time it took to say this one sentence, could a life have been saved?”
Over the last two months, Ai said she has also seen many of her colleagues fall sick and four die from the virus. One of those was Li Wenliang, whose death prompted an unprecedented wave of national anger and mourning.
Early on during the outbreak, public security officials in Wuhan said eight people had been punished for “spreading rumours”. It is not clear if Li was one of those and Ai said her reprimand came from her hospital. Still, several friends have asked Ai if she was one of those whistleblowers.
“I am not a whistleblower,” Ai told Renwu. “I am the one who provided the whistle.”