Five years ago today, five things happened in Wuhan.
1. Doctors at Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Ai Fen and Dr Li Wenliang, blew the whistle on the growing number of SARS-related coronavirus infections.
They put a warning out on WeChat.
Both were severely reprimanded. Dr Ai was told: “You disregard the results of Wuhan’s urban construction since the [World] Military Games; you are a sinner affecting Wuhan’s stability and unity; you are the culprit undermining the City of Wuhan’s forward development.”
Dr Li was forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing “untruthful information”. He later died - supposedly of the infection, which came to be called Covid.
2. Also on December 30, 2019, one person who read the WeChat messages was Dr “George” Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control in Beijing.
He had recently said: “I am very confident to say that ‘SARS-like events’ will not occur again, because the infectious disease surveillance network system of our country is well established, and such events will not happen again.
”So it was with concern that Gao realized he was hearing about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus not through the surveillance network but through social media.
3. Also on December 30, 2019, Dr Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV) was ordered to return to Wuhan from a Shanghai conference. She wondered if the virus came from her lab because she ‘never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China’.
4. Also on December 30, 2019, the WIV’s pathogen database fact sheet was changed. The name of the database changed from ‘Wildlife-borne Viral Pathogen Database’ to ‘Bat and Rodent-borne Viral Pathogen Database’. The words ‘wild animal’ were replaced with ‘bat and rodent’ in at least 10 places.
5. Also on December 30, 2019, ProMED sent a global alert about the "novel coronavirus outbreak".