Wuhan’s survivors share lessons
City’s hospitals jammed during the early days of the outbreak
WUHAN, China — In late 2019, Wuhan businesswoman Duan Ling and her surgeon husband Fang Yushun began to hear snippets in hospital chat groups about a disease emerging in the city’s respiratory wards.
Duan didn’t pay much attention at first.
Fang had that year returned from a stint studying in the United States and the pair, both 36-years-old, were planning a family, starting a costly round of fertility treatments.
“But as more and more news came, we began to realize this was something different from previous infectious diseases,” said Duan.
In just over a month, Fang would become one of the first people in the world to contract what came to be known as COVID-19, which has since infected over 74 million worldwide and killed more than 1.5 million.
During the early days of the outbreak, the city’s hospitals were crushed with patients, testing was scarce, and many doctors worked unprotected.
“At that time, there were a lot of undiagnosed patients appearing already in Wuhan. That’s why we still don’t know how he got infected,” said Duan.
Fang probably caught the disease in the hospital where he works, but the couple also lived within walking distance of Wuhan’s Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where several initial cases were linked, which led to the discovery of the disease.
On the day his case was confirmed, Feb. 3, just over 420 people had died of COVID-19 and Wuhan had begun announcing several thousand new cases a day.
Wuhan was also two weeks into what became a gruelling 76-day lockdown that cut the city off from the rest of China.
“I finally felt that the numbers are not just some cold facts, because among those 2,388 people, one of them is the protector of my small family,” said Duan.
SURVIVORS
Fang was lucky. While 3,869 people would eventually die of coronavirus in Wuhan, he suffered only a moderate case and still had to go to work even after he began showing symptoms, Duan remembers.
Duan also believes it is possible she caught the virus, as she showed some symptoms around the same time, but testing in Wuhan was scarce in the first months of 2020, and limited to some frontline workers and severely ill patients.
When Fang entered hospital, he had a high fever, his resting heart rate was over 100 beats per minute, and his chest X-rays resembled ground glass. Duan characterised the time as surreal.
“When I was alone, I would watch the video of him playing guitar in the dormitory during his study abroad” in 2019, she said, choking up when she recounts the difficult two months they spent apart during his illness and recovery.
“But this epidemic had never let me cry once, and I always believed that we would get through this,” she said.
Video snippets shared by the couple show a masked Fang moving slowly around his ward in blue and white pyjamas.
While Fang was one of the first confirmed patients in the world, his status as a COVID-19 survivor now puts him in a club of more than 70 million people worldwide, many of whom continue to face complex health issues.