Doctor talked of virus as early as January 1
BEIJING: It’s rare for China’s top court to use strong language against the country’s police force. After all, they’re part of the ruling Communist Party of China – the courts in China aren’t independent.
So, it was surprising when the Supreme People’s Court hauled up the Wuhan police for detaining and questioning eight persons for social media posts about a “SARS-like” fever spreading in the city on January 1. The eight, along with an unidentified doctor from a Wuhan hospital, was harassed by police for sharing a post that said several patients had been diagnosed with pneumonia – all from a seafood and fish market in the city, the same market to which more than 90% of the cases are linked.
The doctor, according to the Beijing Youth Daily, had even said in the group that it was new type of virus. The posts were taken as “rumours”, not an alert.
The judge was furious. “It might have been a fortunate thing if the public had believed the ‘rumour’ then, and started to wear masks and carry out sanitisation measures, and avoid the wild animal market,” the judge said. “Facts show that, although the novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia was not SARS, information released by the eight people were not entirely fabricated,” the court said in a social media update.
The judge was clearly voicing public opinion this time.
The doctor and the rest of the group received support from one of China’s top epidemiologists who commended them for being alert. “In retrospect, we should highly praise them. They were wise before the outbreak,” Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention told the tabloid Global Times.
The January 1st alert from the Wuhan group shows that the virulent Coronavirus was in stealthy circulation from December, if not earlier, in the city. Many online users termed detaining of the whistle-blowers as evidence of local authorities’ incompetence to tackle the virus.