Doctor who treated first 7 virus patients
BEIJING: On December 26, Wuhan-based respiratory expert Zhang Jixian, 54, diagnosed four persons including three from the same family with a new kind of flu.
They had one thing in common: On X-ray, their lungs appeared similarly distressed with pneumonia. Next day, three more patients came to her with the same symptoms. Zhang Jixian was alerted.
What particularly worried her was that members of the same family were getting the disease. It meant the disease was infectious. “In general, there will only be one patient when a family visits a doctor, and three people will not get the same disease at the same time unless it is an infectious disease,” she said.
Four among the first seven patients of this new kind of pneumonia had one more thing common – the Huanan seafood and meat market which also traded in wildlife.
Unknown to her, Zhang had become the first doctor in the world to diagnose and then track the novel Coronavirus, which in the next five weeks would kill over 300 and sicken more than 14,000.
A month on, Zhang is now a hero in China. On Sunday, the Wuhan-based Yangtze River Daily became one of the first media to interview her.
Since Zhang’s interview in Chinese went online, it had been read 420 million times and 93000 threads of discussions on it were active on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platforms. Zhang, described as mild mannered and gentle, is the director of the Respiratory and Critical Care department of the Hubei provincial hospital. “This is a disease we have never seen before. There were also four patients from the south China seafood market. This was definitely a problem,” she told the local daily.
HOSPITAL BUILT IN 9 DAYS GIVEN TO ARMY
President Xi Jinping on Sunday commissioned the new 1,000-bed hospital built in nine days to treat those infected with the novel Coronavirus in Wuhan. The People’s Liberation Army will begin admitting patients to the hospital from Monday, state media reported.
Construction of the “Huoshenshan Hospital”, inside the Wuhan Workers’ Sanatorium in Caidian district, began on January 25.