WUHAN: A doctor in China’s Wuhan has criticized hospital authorities for ‘suppressing early warnings’ of the coronavirus outbreak.
She has spoken out after seeing some of her colleagues die from the coronavirus.
Speaking to a Chinese magazine, Renwu (People), Ai Fen, the Director of the emergency at Wuhan Central Hospital, said she was rebuked and reprimanded after alerting her colleagues and superiors of a Sars-like virus seen in patients in last December.
The virus has so far claimed over 3,000 lives inside China, including four doctors at her hospital.
One among the doctors was the whistleblower ophthalmologist Li Wenliang. Now that Dr Ai has risked her jobs, or even go for detention, to speak out about conditions in Wuhan.
She said if she had known what was to happen, she would not have cared about the reprimand.
“I would have spoken about it to whoever, where ever I could,” she said in an interview.
Her interview, however, has been posted and deleted from Chinese social media sites.
The magazine, Renwu, has removed the article. Ai, meanwhile, could not be reached over the phone, Guardian has said in its report.
Meanwhile, internet users have saved the article, posting screenshots of it.
On 30 December, after seeing many patients with flu-like symptoms, Ai received the lab results of one case that contained the word: “Sars coronavirus.”
Ai said that after reading the report several times, she broke out into a cold sweat.
She even circled the words Sars and took a photo. She also sent the photo to a former medical school classmate, who is now a doctor at another hospital in Wuhan.
However, the photo spread throughout medical circles in Wuhan by that evening. The photo was also shared by Li Wenliang that became the first piece of evidence of the outbreak.
The same night, Ai received a message from her hospital saying that the information about the mysterious disease should not be arbitrarily released to avoid causing panic.
Two days later, Dr Ai told the magazine that she was summoned by the hospital’s chief of the disciplinary inspection committee who reprimanded her for spreading rumors and harming stability.
The staff were even forbidden from passing images or messages related to the virus, according to her.
Ai also described the moments that she said would never forget an elderly person staring at a doctor giving him the death certificate of his 32-year-old son.
She also recalled a moment when a father — too sick to get out of the car outside of the hospital. When she had reached the car, the man had died.
(With inputs from Agencies)
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